Len Lye: Love Springs Eternal

Starkwhite is pleased to present Len Lye: Love Springs Eternal from 7 February to 7 March 2018. The exhibition is produced with the support of the Len Lye Foundation, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre and Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision. The Len Lye Foundation will also launch a new book at the opening - The Long Dream of Waking: New Perspectives on Len Lye, edited by Paul Brobbel, Wystan Curnow and Roger Horrocks, and published by Canterbury University Press.

Recognised internationally as one the twentieth century’s great modernist innovators, New Zealand artist Len Lye is most famous for his avant-garde experimental films and for his astonishing and playful kinetic sculptures. Always fascinated by the interplay of movement and light, this extraordinary artist also expressed himself in photography drawing, painting and poetry.

During his lifetime he was better known in the art capitals of North America and Europe than in the country of his birth, but that has changed since the establishment of the foundation dedicated to his works at New Plymouth’s Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and particularly following the opening in 2015 of the Len Lye Centre, New Zealand’s first art museum dedicated to a single artist.

“All of a sudden it hit me – if there is such a thing as composing music, there could be such a thing as composing motion. After all there are melodic figures, why can’t there be figures in motion.” Len Lye

Len Lye: Love Springs Eternal reflects Lye’s life-long interest in composing motion through his kinetic sculptures and films. It includes a 3m tall Fountain with splayed stainless steel rods that create a gentle rustling sound as they sway and collide, and Roundhead (1961), one of the artist’s most delicate kinetic sculptures comprising four concentric circles that spin in space, with a sparse ambient sound track.

Lye was also known for his experimental film work where he pioneered direct filmmaking (films made without a camera) by scratching or painting directly onto celluloid film. This exhibition features the signature Lye film FREE RADICALS (1958), where he reduced film to its most basic elements - light in darkness - by scratching directly onto black film, and Peace (Fountain of Hope) 1950, which was commissioned by the UN to publicise United Nations Day (24th October) and screened worldwide in cinemas and on television. In this one-minute film, Lye superimposed the word for ‘peace’ in many different languages over some of his kinetic sculptures, including Fountain.

Len LyeFREE RADICALS (1958)Collection of the Len Lye Foundation and made available by Nga Taonga Sound and Vision

Len LyePeace (Fountain of Hope), 1959, 1 minCollection of the Len Lye Foundation and made available by Nga Taonga Sound and Vision

Richard Maloy | Things I have Seen

On Friday 22 December - the longest day of the year in the Southern Hemisphere - Starkwhite will screen Richard Maloy’s video Things I have Seen, (14hr 03min 32sec), an outcome of his three-month residency at the Youkobo Art Space in Tokyo from May – July 2017. The video screens from 5.28am (sunrise) to approximately 7.30pm.

Things I Have Seen is a video work made up of many performative actions by the artist, utilising an art material – found clay – and set within an art studio environment. Each action is based the artist’s own memoray of a work of art, not his own, and one which he has physically encountered. Each memory of a work is then connected to in a physical manner by the artist and the process of making.

Things I Have Seen will also be screening in 2018 in the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery’s durational film programme that is dedicated to long-format moving image works (of at least four hours running time) that are screened twice annually on the longest and shortest days in December and June.

The artist wishes to acknowledge the support of Youkobo Art Space Tokyo, Asia New Zealand Foundation and Creative New Zealand

Bio

Richard Maloy works in a wide range of media, including sculpture, photography, video and installation. He was awarded the inaugural Fulbright-Wallace award in 2009 and travelled to the United Sates of America as a visiting Fulbright Scholar in 2010 to take up a three-month artist residency at the Headlands Center of the Arts in San Francisco. In 2008, he was awarded a three-month residency, at Artspace Sydney. From 2009 onwards Maloy has produced many large scale cardboard constructions at public art galleries and museums and for biennials and triennials thoughout Australasia.

Michael Zavros | The Silver Fox

17 November –16 December, 2017

Increasingly Michael Zavros is turning his gaze inward, to home and self, depicting and documenting the Zavros lifestyle in his work. He paints what he appears to have become - a poster boy for a life perfected. He lives an outwardly perfect life, perfectly groomed for lifestyle magazines and shared through social media (he has 99,500 followers on Instagram).

Zavros’s artworks present at first glance as perfectly rendered photo-realist painting, but they generate readings and responses beyond the surface affect. They underscore contemporary society’s obsession with beauty and vanity. As writer Laurence Simmons says: “Like advertising, what is being created in a Zavros painting is not so much an object, a type of physical thing, but rather an artificial need or desire.”

Viewed collectively The Silver Fox offers something of a family portrait, albeit a non-conventional one. The exhibition hinges on the tension between truths and fictions. In his essay in the book Michael Zavros (published by Manuscript, 2017), Simmons makes an analogy with the great Renaissance chronicler Giorgio Vasari whose famous tome The Lives of Artists melded fact and fiction. Whether by design or fate Zavros’s own (brief) history has become the stuff of fictionalised legend - that he paints only in suits, that he lives a life of unrestrained glamour, that his Instagram depicts his best life. TheSilver Fox plays with the veracity of the image and the life, his life, that it depicts.

In the exhibition we see the artist’s son Leo posing in a rainbow wig. In another work he is lip-synching in film as a film clip for Ariana Grande. A film clip in his head.

We see his middle child Olympia contorting herself in a gymnastic pose on a zebra skin. Like Leo, she is acting - or as Zavros would have it, this is role-play in Dad’s curious fiction.

The kitten is a depiction of a pre teen model and her kitten. This is the artist’s eldest daughter Phoebe, the subject of many earlier Zavros ‘self portraits’. This painting sits alongside a self-portrait of the artist (complete with artist’s moniker) as played by supermodel Sean O’Pry; Zavros as his best imagined self.

In Walters/Zavros we see a stylish arrangement of two beautiful things - an ionic column juxtaposed with a famous koru painting by Gordon Walters. Zavros evokes the cultural politics of New Zealand in the 90s (the controversial appropriation debates), but having prompted them, he moves on leaving us with a beautifully rendered fictional interior located within his wider project, highlighting the way his paintings operate as objects of desire for collectors.

The Happy Couple depicts the late JFK junior and his wife Carolyn Bessette as avatars for the artist and his wife. The tragedy of their untimely end is forgotten in the media glare of this perfect moment, where briefly they seem the very definition of happiness. The painting expunges the truths we know about the famous coupling and asks us to re-imagine them as them.

And what of The Silver Fox, a collection of lavender and grey blooms in a silver vase with a fox tail? Is it a creature of mythical elusiveness or the artist himself? Older and wiser. Unseen and unknowable.

These images of self as mediated through his family (and others) offer a glimpse of the artist and his preoccupations through an inward looking lens. They also present as a continuation of his exploration of beauty as a power, a contemporary currency revered above all else.

BIO

Born in Brisbane in 1974, Michael Zavros is a leading Australian artist. His work has been exhibited in major museums and galleries throughout Australia, the United States, New Zealand, Asia and Europe. He graduated from Queensland College of Art, Griffith University with a Bachelor of Visual Arts in 1996.

In 2012 Zavros was awarded the inaugural Bulgari Art Award through the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In 2016 he won the Mosman Art Prize and in 2010 he was awarded the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, the world’s richest prize for portraiture. He has won three major Australian drawing prizes: the 2002 Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award, the 2005 Robert Jacks Drawing Prize and the 2007 Kedumba Drawing Award. He has been a multiple Archibald Prize finalist and was the recipient of the 2004 MCA Primavera Collex Art Award.

Major exhibitions include Surface Affect at Govett Brewster Gallery, New Zealand, 2017, Selectively Revealed, an Asialink and Experimenta Media Arts touring exhibition 2012, and Uncanny (the unnaturally strange), Artspace, Auckland, New Zealand 2007, the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art 2016, Art Gallery of South Australia, GOMA Q at Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2015, Wilderness at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2010, Scott Redford Vs Michael Zavros at the Institute of Modern Art, 2010, Contemporary Australia: Optimism at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2008, and Primavera at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 2000.

Zavros was the subject of a major survey exhibition, Magic Mike in 2017 at Newcastle Art Gallery. Other solo exhibitions include Bad Dad at Starkwhite, Auckland, 2014, A Private Collection: Artist Choice, Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art, The Prince, Rockhampton Art Gallery and Griffith University Art Gallery, The Good Son: Works on Paper, a survey exhibition at Gold Coast City Art Gallery, 2009, Everything I wanted at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane 2003, and solo exhibitions at Art Los Angeles Contemporary 2016 and Art Basel Hong Kong 2015 with Starkwhite, New Zealand.

Zavros has been the recipient of several international residencies including a 2017 residency at PACC in Shanghai, the Australia Council Greene Street Studio, New York in 2015, and the Australia Council Barcelona studio in both 2005 and 2010, and the Australia Council Milan studio residency in 2001. In 2003 he was awarded a Cite International des Arts Residency in Paris through the Power Institute, University of Sydney. In 2004 he was awarded a studio residency at the Gunnery Studios, Sydney, from the NSW Ministry for the Arts.

In 2016 he was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery of Australia to paint Dame Quentin Bryce, and in 2013 by the Australian War Memorial to paint a portrait of Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith.

Michael Zavros served on the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council for the Arts between 2007 and 2011 and currently serves on the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) board, and the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University Advisory Committee.

His work is held in numerous private and public collections, including The National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of South Australia, Queensland Art Gallery, University of Queensland Art Museum, Artbank, National Portrait Gallery, Griffith University Art Collection, Newcastle Region Art Gallery and Tasmanian Museum and Gallery.

Michael Zavros, a new book published by Manuscript in association with Starkwhite and Philip Bacon Galleries. Also available in a clamshell case and as a limited edition with a Zavros etching.

John Reynolds: RocksInTheSky...

17 November - 24 December, 2017

RocksInTheSky… is the third exhibition from Reynolds’ larger, ongoing exploration of Colin McCahon’s ‘missing hours’ when McCahon tragically went missing in the Botanical Gardens on the eve of the launch of his 1984 Sydney Biennale satellite retrospective I Will Need Words. He was found the next day disoriented and with no identification, five kilometers away in Centennial Park. Reynolds’ evolving project is part missing person’s archive, part pilgrimage, part art historical vagabondage.

Reynolds is also the recipient of a Laureate Award from the Arts Foundation of New Zealand, a member of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery Foundation and the subject of Questions for Mr Reynolds, a TV documentary produced by Shirley Horrocks.

Martin Basher | Devil at the Gates of Heaven

10 October - 4 November 2017

Starkwhite is pleased to present Devil at the Gates of Heaven by Martin Basher from 6 October to 4 November 2017. First presented at the University of Auckland’s George Fraser Gallery as the practical component of a 4-year fine art doctoral thesis, this sculptural installation follows our recent presentation of Hawaiian Tropic at Starkwhite (1-26 August 2017). As Basher’s doctoral document, this new exhibition may be read as something of a coda to the previous show, along with Basher’s earlier Jizzy Velvet (2015), and ‘Martin Basher’ (2014).

For a nearly a decade, Basher’s practice has focused in on the forms and imagery of retail space. The sharp linear forms of commercial display materials, including acrylic sheet, mirror film, fluorescent lights and extruded aluminium, along with the saturated hues of liquor, mouthwash, hair products and holiday advertizing have become an enduring lexicon for the artist. This investigation also formed the basis for Basher’s doctoral research, which situated his work in the rich lineage of art-makers concerned with commercial display[1]. Consumption is now an integral part of life; Basher’s practice is a consideration of the ways consumption sites and consumption choices reveal unspoken aspirations, longings and urges.

In the hyper-commercial world we now live in, global retail grosses well in excess of US$20 trillion a year[2]. The overwhelming bulk of our visual communication exists solely to facilitate this retail consumption. Our daily lives are so dominated by consumption that it would be hard to overstate its centrality; a case can be made that the acquisition of commodities now serves as the fundamental means of self-expression. As Harvard University theorist Margaret Crawford writes,

“The ethos of consumption has penetrated every sphere of our lives. As culture, leisure, sex, politics and even death turn into commodities, consumption increasingly constructs the world”

Further, she suggests that when consumption becomes a fundamental part of culture, the act of consuming is itself a constitutional act:

“If the world is understood through commodities, then personal identity depends on ones ability to compose a coherent self-image through the selection of a distinct personal set of commodities.”[3]

For Basher, the retail display space thus becomes a site to probe and construct personae.

In both his paintings and sculpture, Basher’s work echoes (and amplifies) retail strategy, arranging consumer goods on shelves and other display armatures, and situating these alongside paintings so flawless that they appear, graphic, almost digital. In a gallery setting, these arrangements read with all the trappings of ultra high-end retail. Yet unlike conventional retail display, Basher’s selections of goods upset the expected heirrachies and divisions between products. Instead, the products on display point to a more turgid construction of self. Aspirational objects sit alongside the quotidian, and public and private worlds collapse. Fine booze is paried with hair-loss cream, paintings with drain-opener. Bridle-leather becomes a prop for dirty work-out gear. A dusty sprinkle of illicit powder even coats the shelves. In product, the sketchy outlines of a fraught protagonist emerge. In Devil at the Gates of Heaven, this is a distinctly masculine presence, nominally straight but with bent proclivites, a figure of affluence, with bold appetites, bodily insecurities and dark desires. Yet in the lights and mirrors of the exhibition, the viewer is presented not just with product, but with their own reflection, a suggestion perhaps that this protagonist is in part, within us. In so doing, Basher invokes unspoken drives, the mundane and exclusive, the highbrow and lowbrow, and the public and private impulses that inform us as consuming individuals.

New Zealand born Martin Basher received his BA (2003) and MFA (2008) from Columbia University, New York, where he lives and works.

Basher has exhibited widely internationally. Recent exhibitions include a solo presentation at the Armory Show New York 2017 (with Anat Ebgi Gallery), group exhibitions in London, Los Angeles and New York, art fairs in Los Angeles, Milan, Sydney and Paris, a solo exhibition at the City Gallery of Wellington (2014), commissions for Auckland Art Gallery (2013), The Public Art Fund New York (2011) and Socrates Sculpture Park New York (2008).

Basher has been the recipient of the The La Brea Residency in Los Angeles, the McCahon Residency in Auckland, New Zealand, The AAI residency in New York, and the Susan Goodman Residency in Berlin. His work is featured in numerous public and private collections including The Agnes Gund Collection New York, The Majuda Collection Montreal, The Chartwell Collection Auckland and James Wallace Collection Auckland.

[1] A rich history of display-based practice exists in Basher’s New York, from the early work of Jeff Koons and Barbara Kruger through to contemporary peers such as Josh Kline and Mika Tajima. Basher’s doctoral thesis included an extended consideration of work by Haim Steinbach, Josephine Meckseper and Carol Bove, three artists deeply concerned with the politics and potential of display.

[3] Crawford, Margaret, “The World in a Shopping Mall,” in Variations on a Theme Park,: The New American City and the End of Public Space, ed. Michael Sorkin, New York, The Noonday Press, 1996, 15.

Martin Basher, Devil at the Gates of Heaven,installation view, Starkwhite, October 2017

Martin Basher, Devil at the Gates of Heaven,installation view, Starkwhite, October 2017

Martin Basher, Devil at the Gates of Heaven,installation view, Starkwhite, October 2017

Martin Basher, Devil at the Gates of Heaven,installation view, Starkwhite, October 2017

Martin Basher, Devil at the Gates of Heaven,installation view, Starkwhite, October 2017

Martin Basher, Devil at the Gates of Heaven,installation view, Starkwhite, October 2017

Martin Basher, Devil at the Gates of Heaven,installation view, Starkwhite, October 2017

Martin Basher, Devil at the Gates of Heaven,installation view, Starkwhite, October 2017

Martin Basher, Devil at the Gates of Heaven,installation view, Starkwhite, October 2017

Martin Basher, Devil at the Gates of Heaven,installation view, Starkwhite, October 2017

Martin Basher, Devil at the Gates of Heaven,installation view, Starkwhite, October 2017

Martin Basher, Devil at the Gates of Heaven,installation view, Starkwhite, October 2017

Martin Basher, Devil at the Gates of Heaven,installation view, Starkwhite, October 2017

Martin Basher, Devil at the Gates of Heaven,installation view, Starkwhite, October 2017

Daniel von Sturmer, Luminous Figures

Starkwhite is pleased to present Luminous Figures by Daniel von Sturmer from 2 – 30 September 2017. The exhibition is presented in association with Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne.

In Electric Light (facts/figures/starkwhite) a single robotic light scans the room, tracing the space and highlighting the features and facts of the architecture.

Galleries are charged spaces, framing objects, events and activity within them as art. The space is usually intended to recede while the art-object of attention comes to the fore. Electric Light (facts/figures) points to the space itself as object. Conceived as an expanded video, where the viewer’s own agency effects the editing of the narrative, and the gallery becomes a set, the space is rendered a dynamic form; an active stage.

The work projects a series of figures - a line, a square, a circle, a dot - to interact with the given conditions of the space as found. These drawings in light animate across the space, aligning with surfaces, corners, edges and ornamentation. They articulate the facts; details, features and qualities which conspire to produce a particular experience. They draw attention to what is always there, in the background, quietly supporting the main event.

The viewer is choreographed along with the work. We look up, across, around the space. Our agency is shaped, constructed and formed into play. Humour, surprise and interaction are key components of the work. At first it might seem the space is empty, no show to be seen, no art in the room. But then, as it becomes apparent that the stage has already been set, an experience of event is made manifest. We attend to the ephemeral, immaterial qualities of the space. As noted in Electric Light (2016), a "circle of light, slowly panning or abruptly appearing only to fade again, carries associative meaning, evoking the cosmic or the banal; perhaps both at once."

Similar to the way the gallery space frames the art, video always exists within a boundary, a (usually) rectilinear edge. In Luminous Figures (line left) and Luminous Figures (line right) this edge is described by a revolving ribbon of light within a barely discernible box.

Presented side by side, the videos perform a dialogue of movement which renders the pictorial plane unstable and in flux. They make evident the constructed nature of our seeing; a mode of engagement we write anew, moment to moment, to conform our model of the world with what appears to be there.

Biography:

Daniel von Sturmer's practice involves a range of media and approaches including video, photography and installation. His works orchestrate a field of relations between things and people, light and space, video and time, where the encounter between audience and artwork tests the ways in which we conventionally view artworks in a gallery.

In 2007 he represented Australia at the 52nd Venice Biennale, showing in the Australian Pavilion. He has exhibited at numerous public venues including the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; The Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden; and the Hamburger Bahnhoff Museum, Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include Electric Light at Anna Schwartz Gallery (2016), Focus & Field and Camera Ready Actions at Young Projects Gallery, Los Angeles (2014), These Constructs at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne (2014); Video Works, Karsten Schubert Gallery, London (2010) and Set Piece, Site Gallery, Sheffield (2009).

Martin Basher | Hawaiian Tropic

Starkwhite is pleased to present Hawaiian Tropic by New York–based artist Martin Basher from 1 - 26 August 2017.

Basher debuts a new series of landscape-based paintings that make clear the formal genesis of the ultra-saturated, hard-edge abstractions for which he is best known. In four of these new works, photo-real paintings of beaches at sunset are rendered in a brooding monochrome before being tipped sideways, their now-vertical horizons becoming a ground for an overlay of abstract stripes. With the color leached from the actual beach imagery, highly pigmented stripes return the intensity of a sunburst, played out as flawless abstract gradients. The resulting images teeter – the tilted, vertiginous horizons anchored by the compositional logic of the banding on top. Shown in concert with three sunburst abstractions in the same hot orange-yellow palette, the seven paintings in the exhibition establish the clearest interplay yet between these two very different, but deeply intertwined threads in Basher’s practice.

New Zealand born Martin Basher received his BA (2003) and MFA (2008) from Columbia University, New York, where he lives and works.

Basher has exhibited widely internationally. Recent exhibitions include a solo presentation at the Armory Show New York 2017 (with Anat Ebgi Gallery), art fairs in Los Angeles, Milan, Sydney and Paris, a solo exhibition at the City Gallery of Wellington (2014), commissions for Auckland Art Gallery (2013), The Public Art Fund New York (2011) and Socrates Sculpture Park New York (2008).

Basher has been the recipient of the McCahon Residency in Auckland, New Zealand, The AAI residency in New York, and the Susan Goodman Residency in Berlin. His work is featured in numerous public and private collections including The Agnes Gund Collection New York, The Majuda Collection Montreal. The Chartwell Collection Auckland and James Wallace Collection Auckland.

Basher’s painting and sculptural work is situated in the lineage of display-based artistic practices. Working with the languages of retail and advertising, Basher explores the emotional charge of common objects and images. From his trademark paintings of gradated stripes and photo-real beaches to sculptural installations serving as displays for consumer goods, Basher activates spaces of sublimated psychological desire, at once familiar and strange for the altered retail scenarios they present. In these complex displays, Basher invokes unspoken drives, and the mundane and exclusive, the highbrow and lowbrow, and the public and private impulses that inform us as consuming individuals.

Nabokov's Blues: The Charmed Circle

As the most famous novelist of his time, Vladimir Nabokov often featured on the cover of or inside Time, Life, Vogue, and the like, catching butterflies—and so became also the most famous lepidopterist of his time. Most assumed he was just a hobbyist, although a few specialists realized he was a world class scientist, as has been borne out in research, books, and exhibitions from the 1980s to the 2010s.

Internationally renowned New Zealand photographer Fiona Pardington has made it part of her practice for years to reanimate dead material she finds near her home or in museums around the world: birds, mushrooms, plaster life casts of Maori heads, fragments of archival handwriting. She interrogates death and celebrates collecting and preservation.

A Nabokov lover since her teens, she was stunned to read in 2011 how science had vindicated his hunches about the populating of the Americas by the Blues (Polyommatinae) he specialized in. To pay homage, she has photographed, in European and American museums, only butterflies Nabokov caught and killed, words or diagrams in his hand, butterfly images on printed pages he marked: “The butterflies must be his own, their thorax crushed by the fingers that held the pen with which he wrote. Butterflies taken, like relics. One degree of separation. Love and death fold together.”

After waiting for years for the right camera breakthrough, as Nabokov would wait for the right weeks and weather to catch the species he stalked, Fiona has found ways to disclose the beauty and strangeness of what he could see in“the charmed circle of the microscope” (“On Discovering a Butterfly,” 1941).

University Distinguished Professor Brian Boyd

Dr. Fiona Pardington wishes to acknowledge the generous support of Creative New Zealand; Distinguished Professor Brian Boyd, University of Auckland; Macroscopic Solutions; Robert Dirig; Anne Freita; Vladimir Nabokov Literary Foundation; Anthony Marx, Carolyn Broomhead, Thomas Lannon of New York Public Library and Starkwhite, New Zealand.

With thanks to the Musée Cantonal de Zoologie, Lausanne; Cornell University Insect Collection, Department of Entomology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection and the Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room for Rare Books and Manuscripts of the New York Public Library, NY.

Speyeria coronis halcyone Edwards ♂, from Nabokov’s copy of W.J. Holland, The Butterfly Book, 1, 2016. With thanks New York Public Library

Non-exist Future Past: Time spiral, October 28 1964, 1, 2016. With thanks New York Public Library

John Reynolds 2017

John Reynolds: FrenchBayDarkly…

‘Here we go round the mulberry bush‘

T S Ellot

Sixty odd years ago while living in Titirangi’s French Bay, Colin McCahon briefly adopted the habit of rising early at dawn, and as Gordon Brown relates, ‘he would then contemplate the bush with all the intensity he could muster so that the forms of the trees would dematerialize while his sense of spatial depth diminished.’ At its most intense, McCahon likened this illusionary effect to that of the blind man mentioned in Mark’s Gospel who on first receiving his sight, saw “men as trees, walking.”

With FrenchBayDarkly… Reynolds blurs the kaleidoscopic rhapsodies of McCahon’s mid-century French Bay nightscapes with an imagined darker vision from those lost hours when he traversed the street and landscapes of Woolloomooloo nearly thirty years later. Telescoping the ‘soft luminosity ‘of the Titirangi night against the delirium or altered states of McCahon’s harsh nocturnal disprientation, which culminated in the ghost gums of Centennial Park. Pixellating McCahon/s ‘little squares technique’, Reynolds wishes to squint his eyes in contemplation of both these geographies, and a dream aesthetic, where forms prolong and multiply themselves.

FrenchBayDarkly… is the second exhibition from Reynolds’ larger, ongoing exploration of Colin McCahon’s ‘missing hours’ when McCahon tragically went missing in the Botanical Gardens on the eve of the launch of his 1984 Sydney Biennale satellite retrospective I Will Need Words. He was found the next day disoriented and with no identification, five kilometers away in Centennial Park. Reynolds’ evolving project is part missing person’s archive, part pilgrimage, part art historical vagabondage.

Reynolds is currently developing his McCahon archive while on a short stay at the McCahon House in Titirangi and later in the year he will further his McCahon project with a large wall drawing at the Dunden Public Art Gallery.

Reynolds is also the recipient of a Laureate Award from the Arts Foundation of New Zealand, a member of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery Foundation and the subject of Questions for Mr Reynolds, a TV documentary produced by Shirley Horrocks.

On the grounds … We are on our grounds … And the ground is shaking. It is precarious, it is transforming, and it promises horizons. Politically speaking, we are experiencing urgent transitions in our understandings of (home)land, borders, territory, belongingness, natural resources, environment, and earth. Everything is changing at the same time. Everything is absent in being, and present in becoming. The world is sinking. Or we rise together. Are we together in this?

Some exhibitions make themselves. Sometimes exhibitions decide to happen in their ontologies, and like Fluxus, they drop into our realities through the air. They are contagious, they are literally “communicable by contact”. They can spring from a source greater than individual curators or practitioners. Regarding the common space we share through curating, On the Grounds has often felt this way. As if a force greater than history, the artists, writers, activists, the people – perhaps whenua itself – urged us into this composition.

Picturing or knowing the land has historically been used as a device to forge our national identity. Our apparently “empty” land is commonly represented through a colonial lens in the service of identity-building. Such a colonial perspective privileges controlling and shaping the land over allowing the land to shape oneself. We have investigated a gap, a necessity, an urgency to bring together our collective references, understandings, and unique relationships with our location. We let the location go abstract.

We propose to unlearn our privileges. Whenua is a life-force: it defines us, and how we survive and relate to each other. It is whakapapa and our history. As Tau Iwi curators, we have been influenced by local, authentic, and sensitive ways of relating to the land. On the Grounds has been formed by these ways. We are inspired by the tangata whenua and their generosity and hospitality. We respect their spirits, hear their whispers and feel their minds. It is our hope that the greater force of whenua, beyond each individual practitioner, is present within these walls.

Billy Apple

Billy Apple: Art Transactions

8 February

Starkwhite presents Billy Apple: Art Transactions - an exhibition which features P.O.A. and N.F.S. along with an original 1961 drawing for the artist’s proto-conceptual work For Sale, which was recently acquired by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

Apple commented that “FOR SALE was a signifier for something that was happening everywhere. You would walk past a house in London with a sign up saying For Sale, then there was one in a shop or on a car window...”

The two seminal paintings from Apple’s Art Transactions series were conceived thirty years ago in New York during the heyday of the 80s art market boom. They mark the shift from art connoisseurship to the extraordinary commodification of art works that we are experiencing today.

The ‘art business acronyms’ of P.O.A. or price on application doesn’t divulge it’s value and directs the collector straight to dealer for a conversation while N.F.S. remains in it’s crate to emphasise it’s unavailability.

The text-based works in Apple’s Art Transactions series excavated and drew attention to the necessary relationship between artist–dealer–collector. Their prosaic titles document the activities between this nexus; Sold (1981), Bartered (1984), Exchanged (1985), Auctioned, (1985), AC/DC (1986), Commissioned (1987), P.O.A. and N.F.S. (1987).

Curator, Christina Barton notes that Art Transactions proved to be an ongoing means for the artist to negotiate his life as a social being. In 1987 the Paid series was introduced, utilising a catch phrase that Billy Apple and Wystan Curnow devised in 1985 – ‘The artist has to live like everybody else’. Apple uses Paid works to negotiate the costs of everyday living by having collectors pay his invoices; or Barter series where he exchanges professional services such as $100,000 Credit Held (in 2005 for intellectual property legal services provided by the law firm Minter Ellison Rudd Watts). The Transactions series even include works that function as promissory notes for Apple’s private currency (I.O.U., 1987-2009).

This exhibition will evolve into a group show (including Billy Apple) curated by Artspace director Misal Adnan Yildiz.

Beyond Landscape

17 November to 17 December 2016

Starkwhite is pleased to present Beyond Landscape from 17 November to 17 December 2016. The exhibition explores approaches to landscape informed by place, culture and history, through the photographs of Danie Mellor (AUS), Jin Jiangbo (CN) and Gavin Hipkins (NZ).

Danie Mellor’s work has addressed Australia’s colonial past and its legacies today, exploring themes that are critically linked to cultural histories and concepts of the landscape. A more recent focus has been on ideas of authenticity within the image and how this is linked to the powerful undercurrent of nostalgia in historical imagery.

Created for the Adelaide Biennale of Art: Magic Object (2016), thephotographs in Beyond Landscape explore our relationship with the ‘otherness’ of the natural world. Nature – the world and its matter, whether alive or inert – becomes a magic object in and of itself for Mellor. Lush rainforest vegetation, conjured in the artist’s signature blue palette seduce and entrap the viewer. With Aboriginal and Anglo-Australia heritage, Mellor draws on Western traditions and indigenous cultural perspective to create imagery that suggests multiple ways of approaching the conceptual space of our environment.

New Zealand is a country celebrated for its natural beauty, its vast landscapes appearing on tourist posters and in feature films worldwide. In his Dialogue with Nature series Shanghai-based artist Jin Jiangbo layers his own cultural landscape upon ours, to capture in the shanshui tradition New Zealand’s mountains, oceans and beaches not with ink on paper, but through the lens of a camera. He offers us a reworking of our own landscape through his own heritage, giving it a cultural inflection that allows New Zealanders to look through new cultural eyes - to look afresh at what we thought we knew. Presenting the work in the style of a one-and-a-half-millennia-old tradition, Jin Jiangbo has made the familiar unfamiliar.

With his New Age and The Sanctuary series, Gavin Hipkins presents landscape vistas and fragments of nature, overlaid with buttons, beads and lace, and produced under the seductive guise of pictorial photography. They highlight his interest in the unoccupied landscape as a contested space. An amalgam of photogram and the photograph, The Sanctuary works have connoted calligraphy, animation, ghost traces and the late nineteenth century scientific art of chrono-photography. These series also pay homage to oriental and New Age references. Under this reverent light, the domestic materials Hipkins places on the prints can also be interpreted as worry beads sitting atop of a familiar vernacular landscape: beautiful, romantic, and ultimately, sexualized landscape.

The exhibition also includes Hipkins’ recent video, New Age 2016. Calling on passages from an English spiritualist manual from the 1870s, Hipkins’ video explores the ritual landscape of Avebury’s stone circles. Imagining a solstice celebration with his friends, spiritualism and spirit photography are revisited in the twenty-first century.

ARTISTS BIOS

Born in Mackay, Queensland, Danie Mellor has lived, worked, travelled and studied in Australia, England, Scotland and South Africa. His work has been regularly shown in significant exhibitions, including Story Place, Queensland Art Gallery and Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art, CultureWarriors and unDisclosedat the National Gallery of Australia, and Sakahàn, the inaugural international survey of Indigenous art at the National Gallery of Canada in 2013.

Recent projects include a major 10-year survey at University of Queensland Art Museum in 2014, and a solo exhibition of his works Primordial: SuperNaturalBayiMinyjirralat the National Museum of Scotland as part of the Edinburgh Art and International Festivals. Major works were created for the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial at QAGOMA, the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art at AGSA and the Samstag Museum, and the inaugural Yinchuan Biennale For an Image, Faster Than Light held at the Yinchuan Museum of Contemporary Art.

Mellor’s work is represented in permanent international, national, state, regional, university and important private collections within Australia and overseas, and has won several awards.

In addition to his art practice, Danie held positions of lecturer and senior lecturer at the National Institute of the Art, ANU and Sydney College of the Arts, USYD, and was appointed to the Visual Arts Board as member and Chair at the Australia Council for the Arts. After receiving a Bachelor of Arts (Visual) with Honours from Canberra School of Art and a MA (Fine Art) from Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, University of Central England, UK, he completed his doctorate at the School of Art, National Institute of the Arts, ANU in Canberra in 2004.

Based in Shanghai, Jin Jiangbo is one of China's foremost recent generation of media artists. He was born in 1972 in Zhejiang province and is completed his PhD at Tsinghua University in Beijing in 2012.

Jin Jiangbo is currently Associate Dean at the Shanghai Academy of Arts, Shanghai University and Executive director of the University’s Public Art Coordination Centre. He is a founding member of the International Award for Public Art (Shanghai) and a trustee of the Institute for Public Art (Hong Kong).

Gavin Hipkins is an Auckland-based artist who works with photography and moving image. He has been described as a ‘tourist of photography’ reflecting a strategic treatment of eclectic styles and diverse photographic techniques. Over the last two decades his practice has engaged postcolonial, architectural, and commodity discourses via a range of analogue and digital technologies, photo-installations, and artist videos. Recent exhibitions include: International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany (2016); International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Netherlands (2015); The Jewish Museum, New York, USA (2015); Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), New York, USA (2014); Edinburgh Art Festival, Scotland (2014).

He represented New Zealand at the 1998 Sydney Biennale, and the 2002 Sao Paulo Biennale. He was the recipient of the inaugural residency for New Zealand artists at Artspace Sydney, in 1998. In 2006 he completed an artist’s residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York, and in 2007 completed the McCahon Residency in Auckland. His work is included in major public and private collections including the Queensland Art Gallery, the Auckland Art Gallery, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts, and George Eastman Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York. He is an Associate Professor at Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland.

Danie Mellor, on a noncorrelationist thought IX, 2016.

Danie Mellor, on a noncorrelationist thought VI, 2016

Danie Mellor, on a noncorrelationist thought XII, 2016

Jin Jiangbo, Silent, 2011, 120 diameter.

Jin Jiangbo, Deep 2011, 1000 x 740 mm

Jin Jiangbo, Continuous 2011, 120 mm diameter.

Gavin Hipkins, New Age (2016), 10 minute HD video, production still

Gavin Hipkins, The Sanctuary: Los Angeles (ruins), 2006, 375 x 375mm.

Gavin Hipkins, New Age (Falls), 2009, 800 x 800 mm.

John Reynolds | WalkWithMe...

30 August – 24 September, 2016

‘Colin McCahon lost his mind in the palm grove of Sydney's Botanical Garden’, according to cinematographer Leon Narbey in conversation with writer Martin Edmond, following their chance encounter with the artist near the corner of K Rd and Ponsonby Rd, sometime in the mid-1980s. In his book Dark Night, Edmond went on to describe McCahon on that day as ‘a man in a hurry who nevertheless had nowhere to go. His eyes in particular were both haunting and haunted’.

In 1984 McCahon tragically went missing in the Botanical Gardens on the eve of the launch of his Sydney Biennale satellite retrospective I Will Need Words. He was found the next day disoriented and with no identification, five kilometers away in Centennial Park.

With this new project, WalkWithMe… John Reynolds speculates on the possible nature of those missing hours. Leaning on the psychogeography of Edmond's rich text, Reynolds compiles across a variety of mediums,

a pedestrian philosophy of walking, a slow tracking of the fleeting imagery of the urban spectacle, a rummaging of hallucinations, visions and deliriums. Part missing persons archive, part pilgrimage, part art historical vagabondage. Reynolds wanders with accelerations and slowings across Wooloomooloo and Grey Lynn in a plaintive exhortation to WalkWithMe... Alone, together.

Reynolds is also the recipient of a Laureate Award from the Arts Foundation of New Zealand, a member of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery Foundation and the subject of Questions for Mr Reynolds, a TV documentary produced by Shirley Horrocks.

Laith McGregor | Swallow the Sun

Starkwhite is pleased to present Swallow the Sun by Laith McGregor from 1 October - 12 November 2016

During his recent travels in South East Asia, Laith McGregor has been exploring the conceptual foundations of portraiture, from primitive mark making through to contemporary practice, and the discourses surrounding it, while being immersed in various cultural communities. He says: “The resulting work is an outcome of my ongoing research to understand the complexity of the human experience and my place within it, in particular investigating the relationship of various interpretations of portraiture as a common vernacular, through the use of masks, deities and notion of the self.”

The new work in Swallow the Sun is informed by McGregor’s experience of South East Asia, including a lengthy stay on a small island off the coast of Bali, when the only information he received was from overseas sources at various times and locales, via the internet. “Time felt like it was condensing, becoming arbitrary, barely a function to signal the difference between night and day,” he says. “I had a feeling of being displaced, not knowing languages, unfamiliar locations, people. Time was slowing down, every day felt like the last and simultaneously the first. I would spend the mornings in the studio, most afternoons exploring, eating, swimming, and then back to the studio at night - the same again the next day. This new body of work attempts to recreate that feeling of isolation, stillness and longing.”

In Swallow the Sun, McGregor presents a timeless apparition of figures and landscapes with his signature eyelike circles that are at once unfamiliar, but also eerily familiar due to their immutable appearance. Beautifully rendered as drawings, the portraits are a contemplation on time, combined with moments of intuition that coalesce in the exhibition to form an intimate space within which the viewer can experience insights into the artist’s way of thinking.

“Drawing is a fundamental form of human expression, says McGregor. “The line as a symbolic gesture dates back to our primitive origins and has filtered into the fabric of everyday life where it remains a primal instinct, used to map, guide, express and converse. It’s an immediate action that bridges consciousness. Repetitive mark-making acts like a tapestry of days in ones life. Prisoners scratch the number of days left in solitary confinement, while marooned sailors mark the number of days stranded on a deserted island, both drawing similar but polar conclusions.”

McGregor’s research into the conceptual foundations of portraiture takes place across time, place and culture. While in South East Asia he was looking at Western traditions as well as those of the East (via the ubiquitous internet). In addition to the large drawings of figures and landscapes that stand in the exhibition like dark monoliths, Swallow the Sun features early 20th century vintage portraits by unknown artists, which McGregor has made over. He resurrects a presence, knowing the subjects from a not too distant past once sat for an hour or two in a similar intimate space with an artist. We experience the space that the sitter and artist once encountered, now located in a grey area between fiction and reality.

The exhibition also includes an installation of material from McGregor’s studio. A large drop sheet with traces of his art making and impressions recording his movements around the studio is pinned to the wall like a giant abstract work. A small, framed work displays the pencil shavings, collected over the duration of the shows development, showing the history and detritus of the unseen and displaced.

The drawings in Swallow the Sun echo the presence, of some other - the various and largely unknown figures throughout the show that sit somewhere between the real and the unreal. The subtle observations revealed in the works emphasise polarities of the human condition and continue a dialogue on the position of the artist and the uncanny. Through these nuanced explorations of the intersection between real and unreal spaces, and also the parallels that exist between them, the artist aims to establish a breakdown of this limboed existence and allow the viewer a private peek into oblivion. “Darkness is arbitrary, death is approaching and life is nothing but an ephemeral moment,” he says. “We must all walk the line.”

He has been the recipient of numerous awards and including: the Australia Print Workshop Collie Print Trust Fellowship; National Works on Paper Prize, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery; and the Art & Australia/Credit Suisse Private Banking Contemporary Art Award. And he has undertaken residencies at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; the Australia Council’s studio in Barcelona; and at the Centre Intermondes in La Rochelle, France.

McGregor’s work is represented in the following collections: Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; The National Art Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane; and the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.

High Tide, 2016, pencil on paper, 157 x 237cm

Wayfarer, 2016, pencil on paper, 157 x 237cm

Untitled, 2016, pencil on paper, 55 x 76 cm

Untitled, 2016, pencil on paper, 55 x 76 cm

Untitled, 2016, pencil on paper, 55 x 76 cm

Space, 1950-2016, pencil on paper, 82 x 71cm

Hope, 1900 -2016, pencil on paper, 62 x 50cm

Chess, 2016, pencil on paper, 82 x 71cm

Sunk, 2016, pencil on paper, 46 x 36cm

Posted, 1950- 2016, pencil on paper, 82 x 71cm

Clouds 2/XII 1940-2016, pencil on paper, 56 x 48cm

Cope, 2016, pencil on paper, 52 x 41cm

Slips, 2016, pencil on paper, 51 x 41cm

Song, 2016, pencil on paper, 44 x 44cm

Hobo, 1900-2016, pencil on paper, 54 x 44cm

Matt Henry | Analogues

19 September – 14 October (upstairs gallery)

Starkwhite presents a suite of recent paintings by Matt Henry from 19 September to 14 October. Previously shown at Goya Curtain in Tokyo, these works appropriate specific graphic motifs found in the artist’s collection of video and audio media.

Using the anachronistic technology of painting Henry extracts memories from these obsolete formats in a way that parallels the often obsessive and reductive nature of Hi-Fi.

Drawing upon his library as source material he proposes these paintings as models that inform his experience of colour field painting, and as objects and memories that challenge modernist doctrines attached to non-objective abstraction.

Matt Henry (born 1973) lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand. Playing upon the contextual openness of reductive abstraction, Henry employs painting as a mimetic tool that often exploits formal intersections between the languages of painting and design. He received his MFA from Melbourne’s RMIT university in 2008 and his work is held in public and private collections including the Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tāmaki; Wallace Arts Trust; New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade; Elevation Capital Art Collection and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.

Daniel Crooks | Vanishing Point

3 - 27 August

Starkwhite is pleased to present Vanishing Point, by Daniel Crooks. The exhibition will premiere a new series of single channel works, which further investigate the artists’ interest in the convergence of time, trains and cinema. Concerned with multiple worlds and parallel realties, these new videos can be seen as an expansion of Crooks’ recent project Phantom Ride completed earlier this year as the recipient of the second Ian Potter Moving Image Commission.

Crooks' complex and beautiful time structures reveal a poetic sensibility that belies the technical sophistication of their production. Treating time as a physical, malleable material his works stretch and distort reality while questioning our perception of it.

Practising across a range of media including video, photography, sculpture and installation, Daniel Crooks’ work has been widely exhibited internationally.

A graduate of the VCA School of Film and Television, Crooks’ graduate film screened at numerous international film festivals winning the City of Stuttgart Prize for Animation and an Australian Short Film Award. In 1997 He received an Australia Council research Fellowship at RMIT, Melbourne and between 2004 and 2005 undertook residencies at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam and the London studio of the Australia Council. For 3 months during 2014 Crooks was artist in residence at the FutureLab in Linz, Austria. In 2008, a major survey show, Everywhere Instantly was held at the Christchurch Art Gallery, Te Puna o Waiwhetu and in 2013 The Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide presented a survey show including a major 5 channel installation commissioned by the The Adelaide Film Festival.

Crooks has also held solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; The Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane and Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne. Recent group shows include Light Moves; Contemporary Australian Video Art, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Marking Time, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; 2012 Adelaide Biennial, Adelaide; Yebisu International Festival, Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo, 2011; 17th Biennale of Sydney, 2010; Cubism and Australian Art, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne 2009; Figuring Landscapes at the Tate Modern, London 2008; The Anne Landa Award at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 2006.

In 2011 Crooks was awarded a Jury Prize in the Signature Art Prize (Singapore Art Musuem) and in 2008 was the recipient of the inaugural Basil Sellers Art Prize. In 2014 Crooks was awarded the Ian Potter Moving Image Commission and the work created Phantom Ride was exhibited at ACMI earlier this year.

Material Candour 2016

5-22 July 2016

Starkwhite is pleased to present Material Candour, a group show by Gavin Hipkins (NZ), Richard Maloy (NZ) and Daniel von Sturmer (AUS). The three installations in the exhibition foreground process as a core component of the works, not just the work behind the works. The measure of these pieces is a function of the handwork they occasion as well as what they call forth.

Drawing on the experimental approaches of the 1920s avant-garde, Gavin Hipkins arranges polystyrene balls and rings on light-sensitive paper and then exposes then to light to make his photograms. The subject matter is typically banal and pointedly inconsequential, but repeated, massed and marshaled, the cumulative effect is monumental signposting his interest in failed utopias. Curator Robert Leonard says: “Hipkins’ retro-modernist arrangements hark back to a time when photography’s new ways of seeing were optimistically linked to a new view of the modern world aligned with both progressive social programmes (Rodchenko and Moholy-Nagy) and fascist ones (Riefenstahl).“

In Material Candour Hipkins presents The Port (2000), a 12-part work of photograms, each measuring 760 x 1000 mm. Another 32-part work from this series, The Coil (1998), is currently showing in Emanations: The Art of the CameralessPhotograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.

From a distance Richard Maloy’s Yellow Structure appears to be a solid, monumental form – a rock-like sculpture that is formal and minimal in nature. It draws viewers in, where on closer inspection it reveals its humble, degradable construction of common industrial materials – cardboard, tape and paint. The hand of the artist is apparent in the wonky construction, DIY taping and slapdash paint job. All visible structural components are wrapped in cardboard and painted so the entire piece, even the posts and struts, appear to be hand-made of light-weight cardboard – a monumental mass with no apparent signs of support, that could collapse or fall apart.

Yellow Structure (variation) is an upside down version of Maloy’s sculpture presented in the Encounters section of Art Basel Hong Kong in March this year, which was curated by Alexie Glass-Kantor. Rather than presenting a finished work at the launch of Material Candour, Maloy will continue to develop his sculpture throughout the duration of the exhibition.

The artist wishes to acknowledge the generous support of the Asia New Zealand Foundation and Creative New Zealand, delivered through the Asia/New Zealand Co-commissioning Fund, with the presentation of Yellow Structure at Art Basel Hong Kong and Starkwhite.

Daniel von Sturmer’s video small world (chalk drawing) begins with a black screen. A moment later a hand appears at the bottom of the screen holding a piece of chalk, which traces a not-quite-perfect circle on the rotating black ground. The hand pulls away and the circle continues to rotate, then the hand reappears holding an eraser and the line soon disappears leaving a black screen, ending as it began. As Tara McDowell observes: “von Sturmer’s videos connect to a longstanding tradition of drawing as studio practice, though here that very practice becomes the work, carefully composed and executed.”

The exhibition also includes small world (landscape painting) where multiple lines of white paint drip down from an unseen source, slowly coating the surface. Eventually the white paints covers its allotted area so completely “that it cedes its own materiality, so palpable as wet paint, in pure image,” says McDowell. “It is testament to von Sturmer’s intuitive and deft touch with his medium that he makes us feel the materiality of the thing depicted, as if we could reach out and touch it even though we know it is an illusion.”

Daniel von Sturmer is represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and we are grateful for their support for this exhibition.

Artist Bios

Gavin Hipkins is an Auckland-based artist who works with photography and moving image. He has been described as a ‘tourist of photography’ reflecting a strategic treatment of eclectic styles and diverse photographic techniques. Over the last two decades his practice has engaged postcolonial, architectural, and commodity discourses via a range of analogue and digital technologies, photo-installations, and artist videos. In 2010 he started making fragmented narrative films that frequently call on nineteenth-century references, and adapts these writings to contemporary settings. His projects engage film as a cinematic art that blurs definable genres between drama, documentary, film essay, and experimental narrative structures.

Hipkins represented New Zealand at the 1998 Sydney Biennale, and the 2002 Sao Paulo Biennale. Residencies include the inaugural residency for New Zealand artists at Artspace Sydney (1998), the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York (2006), and the McCahon Residency Auckland (2007).

Richard Maloy works in a wide range of media, including sculpture, photography, video and installation. He was awarded the inaugural Fulbright-Wallace award in 2009 and travelled to the United Sates of America as a visiting Fulbright Scholar in 2010 to take up a three-month artist residency at the Headlands Center of the Arts in San Francisco. In 2008, he was awarded a three-month residency, at Artspace Sydney. From 2009 onwards Maloy has produced many large scale cardboard constructions at public art galleries and Museums and for biennials and Triennials though-out Australasia.

Daniel von Sturmer’s practice involves video, photography, installation and architectural interventions. His works have their basis in traditional media such as paint and sculpture, often referencing abstraction, still life, modernism and minimalism. His works draw connections between psychology and philosophy and aim to make manifest the psychological and perceptual elements at play in the encounter with artworks.

He represented Australia in the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007 and in the 14th Biennale of Sydney, and was a finalist in the 2004 Walters Prize.

Fiona Pardington | 100% Unicorn

24 May - 25 June 2016

‘Well, now that we have seen each other,’ said the unicorn,‘if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you.’–Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll, 1871

Fiona Pardington’s menagerie of glass unicorns perform several functions in the context of the still life. Traditionally glass objects frequently appeared in vanitas paintings, symbolising the fragile ephemerality of life, but also allowing the artist to show off their skill in depicting its translucence and reflective qualities. In Pardington’s work they also allude to the photographic process, manipulating and directing light. When the Abbot Suger (ca 1081-1151) set about in 1137 renovating the Church of Saint-Denis in Paris, in the Rayonnant Gothic style, stained glass was central to his vision, likening the light passing through the glass as being like the Holy Spirit illuminating the soul without changing its substance. Light plays a similar transformative and spiritual role in Pardington’s work. Light is what unifies the compositions visually and metaphorically.

The Unicorn is an ancient and archetypal beast. The version we mostly think of is the stallion with a single horn thrusting from its brow, rearing rampant, as seen in the famous Flemish tapestries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Cloisters Collection in New York, and as the heraldic lunar beast of Scotland (mortal enemy, now co-shield bearer of England’s solar lion) in the coat of arms of the United Kingdom. Most often the mythological cryptid represents a paradoxical mix of meanings: lust, purity, virility and the masculine principle, chastity, chivalry, loyalty, ferocity, the divine right of kings, all manner of virtues, fantasy, and magic. Its spiralling, phallic horn was reputed to purify water, and it was said that it could only be tamed by a virgin. As Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his notebooks: “The unicorn, through its intemperance and not knowing how to control itself, for the love it bears to fair maidens forgets its ferocity and wildness; and laying aside all fear it will go up to a seated damsel and go to sleep in her lap, and thus the hunters take it.”

Although in recent years the unicorn has been manifest in the sublimity of Peter S. Beagle’s 1968 novel and subsequent 1982 animated film The Last Unicorn, and the playful ridiculousness of Lauren Faust’s reboot of the My Little Pony franchise, the unicorn is as old as civilisation itself. The Indian Museum in Kolkata preserves depictions of it on seals from the Indus Valley civilization dating back to 2500BCE. For the Greeks, it was an actual rather than mythological animal. Ctesius of Cnidus (fifth century BCE) describes the unicorn as a kind of wild ass native to India. The earliest references to the unicorn-like qilin can be found in Chinese writings around the same time. Strabo (64BCE-ca 24CE) in his Geographica places them in the Caucuses. Pliny the Elder (23CE-79CE) writes of it in his encyclopaedic Naturalis Historia, calling it the Monoceros. Aelian (ca 175-ca 235CE) writes that the Monoceros was also called the Cartazonos – which some scholars suggest is related to the word Kargadan which is both Persian and Arabic for Rhinoceros. Marco Polo was clearly looking at a rhino when he wrote of the unicorn, “They are very ugly brutes to look at. They are not at all such as we describe them when we relate that they let themselves be captured by virgins, but clean contrary to our notions.”

The unicorn as we think of it today, however, the unicorn of these little glass and ceramic figurines, is a product of medieval Europe. The early bestiaries made the story about virgins and unicorns an allegory of Incarnation of Christ. For later poets like Thibaut of Champagne (1201-1253, King of Navarre from 1234), Richard de Fournival (1201-ca 1260) and Petrarch (1304-1374) the unicorn was a symbol of courtly love. A brisk trade in cups of “unicorn horn” or alicorn abounded. Such vessels, usually narwhal tusk or ivory, were supposed to detect or even neutralise the assassin’s poisons. Even as late as the mid eighteenth century one could purchase powdered unicorn horn, though physician philosophers such as the Dane Olaus Wormius (1588-1654), the Englishman Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), and the German Paul Ludwig Sachs in his 1676 book the Monocerologia had discerned and mocked the fraud in the previous century. At its height, the horn was worth 10 times its weight in gold.

The eventual acceptance that the unicorn wasn’t a real animal did not, however, deter its popularity as a symbol for the spiritual. Just as the medieval Christians saw the unicorn as a symbol of Christ, so too did twentieth century occultism see it as a symbol of the spiritual existence of humanity. The single horn on the beast’s brow came to be considered an allusion to the pineal gland – the so called “third eye” – the part of the brain supposedly concerned with spiritual and psychic matters. The horn could also be read as a ray of divine cosmic energy and spiritual revelation piercing the mundane physical world. The apparent paradox of a pure and feminine-seeming creature representing virginity defined by its masculine phallic horn could be read as an alchemical marriage of opposites that transcends sexuality – a spiritual evolution from there merely biological and procreative to the holistic sexual oneness of a higher being. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn – the very private occult society that did much to formalise the occult revival of ceremonial magic – gave initiates the title Monocris de Astris – “Unicorn from the Stars”. While the Golden Dawn claimed to reject the sexual element of occultism, sex magician and self-proclaimed “wickedest man in the world” Aleister Crowley was an initiate before splitting off to form his own Order of the Silver Star.

It is this apotropaic reputation of the unicorn, the warding off of evil and danger that transfers to these figurines. All miniatures encourage us to project an illusion of order and control over our lives of happenstance in a chaotic and arbitrary universe, but the unicorns themselves are also subconscious lucky charms, amulets, allusions to a fantastical and magical realm beyond mundane existence. Tennessee Williams in his 1944 play The Glass Menagerie makes much of this symbolism. The character Laura Wingfield, painfully shy and afflicted with a limp from a childhood bout of Polio, uses her collection of glass animals as a way of retreating from the world. Their fragility reflects her own; quaint, slightly old fashioned, catching the light if you look in the right way. In particular Laura identifies with a glass unicorn, the otherness repressing her represented by the unicorn’s horn that distinguishes it from other animals.

Perhaps that’s why an air of melancholy attends these figurines. Their kitsch value places them outside of the continuum of artistic received taste and high culture. Kitsch, though, has its own integrity. It embraces sentimentality, which is as much a genuine human emotional response as any noble or heroic gesture. The unicorn is the ultimate symbol of the enchantment that Max Weber claimed had been driven from the world by modernity. The unicorn figurine is the transcendental made domestic and human. If it represents anything in Pardington’s art, it is the idea of Deleuzian Immanence – that all redundancies, rejections, cruelties, everything that seems outside of life, and even death itself, are all firmly embedded in life, the here and now, and the unicorn’s raised horn is a lightning conductor channelling possibility into the humblest context, bringing being and existential authenticity into the photographic medium.

ANDREW PAUL WOOD

White_Light_Unicorn 2016

Flora_Unicorn 2016

Sanguine_Unicorn 2016

Luna_Unicorn 2016

Unicorn_Lovers 2016

Layla Rudneva-Mackay: Running Towards Water

7 June – 8 July 2016

Layla Rudneva-Mackay presents a new suite of paintings of flowers that are reminiscent of Post-Impressionist works and recall their observation of what has been traditionally considered a less lofty artistic genre. They also reveal her continuing interest in form and patches or fields of colour, employed in a way that is clear, but not explicit. The visuality of her work is always underlined by a certain silence or a poetic turn in title and a concern with what is it to show someone something rather than telling them. The act of observation and its material expression demands a radical slowness and humility of gesture and the steady, abstracting attention of the eye…all things that define Rudneva-Mackay’s practice.

Layla Rudneva-Mackay graduated with an MFA from the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, in 2006. She has been described as an artist with a practice that makes a space for being lost for words.

Clinton Watkins | lowercase

Starkwhite is pleased to present lowercase by Clinton Watkins from 19 April to 18 May 2016.

lowercase is a collection of video works that explore notions of real world vs. virtual space via natural objects found in remote locations in New Zealand. The perpetual spinning of such objects seeks to offer a refrain from the maelstrom of modern existence whilst offering a critical and reflective space to consider the self within increasingly uncertain times.

Clinton Watkins produces artwork that investigates affects that combinations of sonic and visual information can have on an audience. The key conceptual issues of his work are drawn from an interest in constructing immersive experiences through the use of sound, colour and scale of installation incorporating video projection, television monitors and custom-made audio and video hardware. The visual and sound base of his work focuses on the characteristics, structures, phenomena, and processing of sonic and visual material through the exploration of repetition, distortion, duration and form via a minimalist sensibility.

Watkins is also a practicing experimental musician who regularly produces and performs as a solo artist and collaboratively as an active member of the minimal electronic improvisation sextet, Plains, one half of the electronic noise duo 1000 and most recently working with artist Santiago Sierra and performing along-side legendary free jazz saxophonist Peter Brötzmann.Watkins has numerous releases of recorded material published on a variety of local and international record labels such as Circle, 20 City, Claudia, Mystery Sea, CMR, Absurd and Scarcelight. Watkins has a Doctoral Degree in Fine Arts, and lecturers at AUT in the Colab department teaching experimental electronics, installation, sound and moving image.

Whitney Bedford 2016 | Lost and Found

Starkwhite is delighted to present Lost and Found, a solo exhibition of new landscape paintings by Whitney Bedford, from 15 March to 14 April 2016.

Over the last several years Bedford has developed a deeply personal iconography. Her paintings, which she often describes as votives, are visual evocations of potent emotional and psychological states. Most recently she has been exploring the idea of the Sublime, particularly as described by Edmund Burke in his 1757 treatise on aesthetics: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Bedford’s paintings straddle the tension between the sublime and the beautiful, qualities that Burke describes as complimentary. “Sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small: beauty should be smooth and polished; the great [sublime], rugged and negligent…” In Bedford’s paintings, these oppositional forces appear in the volatile interaction between her precise, almost x-ray ink drawings on canvas and her tempestuous, forceful application of oil paint to their compositions.

Bedford’s exhibition will include a series of uniformly scaled paintings addressing the desert landscapes of her adopted environment. These images of a tropical desert form an exploration of the sublime, of Eden, of the origins of awe in nature, that hints at the cinematic. They embody contradictions of dark and light, of the real and imagined, becoming dangerous and serene. She also presents two shipwreck paintings rendered with her exemplary draftsmanship and painterly exuberance, where ink drawing interacts with and is subsumed by oil paint to form mercurial compositions.

Bedford received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2003. She was awarded a Krasner Pollock Grant in 2015 was the winner of the 2001 UCLA Hammer Museum Drawing Biennale. She also received a Fulbright Graduate Fellowship from Hochschule der Kuenste, Berlin in 1999. She has had solo exhibitions at Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago, IL; Cherrydelosreyes Gallery, Los Angeles; D’Amelio Terras Gallery, New York; Art Concept, Paris, and Starkwhite, Auckland, New Zealand. She has been included in group exhibitions at the Jewish Museum, New York; Massachussetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver. Bedford’s work is included in the Jumex Collection, Mexico City, Mexico; the De La Cruz Collection, Miami, Florida, USA; The Saatchi Collection, London, England; the Francois Pinault Collection, Paris, France; the Eric Decelle Collection, Brussels, Belgium; and the Collection Ginette Moulin/Guillaume Houze, Paris, France. Lost and Found is Bedford’s third solo exhibition at Starkwhite.

Alicia Frankovich | The Female has Undergone Several Manifestations

6 February - 5 March 2016

Starkwhite is delighted to present The Female has Undergone Several Manifestations by Berlin-based artist Alicia Frankovich, from 6 February to 5 March 2016. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. She will be present at the opening preview on Friday 5 February from 5.30 – 8pm.

Alicia Frankovich has exhibited widely in New Zealand and Internationally. She works at the intersection of performance and sculpture, where she builds successions of varying images, embodiments and movements.

She is well-known for her live performances and sculptural and video presentations, such as the memorable Floor Resistance in the 2012 Walters Prize exhibition; Free Time/The Opportune Spectator in the Anne Landa Award exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney in 2013; Free Time at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris in 2013; her major sculptural, video and performance work Defending Plural Experiences at ACCA in 2014; and her recent large-scale exhibition of sculptures at Complex Bodies, Gebert Stiftung für Kultur, Switzerland in 2015.

“The transformation of physicality into sculpture is one striking aspect of her work. Moments of bodily experience are transformed into various materials, or conversely these experiences are transformed into movements, and then back into sculptural moments.” Christina Lehnert

Frankovich’s ongoing interest as an artist is to create new languages that merge sensibilities, materialities, movements and experiences from various fields. This mode of producing combines history with the present and forms a relationship with future embodiments and environments that allow for possibility and transformation.

She says: “I hope that this could impact how we as participants coexist in a web of human and non-human relations. For my own work and thinking this is useful in the way that it expands on the possibilities for understanding our make-up and allowing scope for our potential ways of being. It is in this way of thinking that I make combinations between a series of works so as to allow for multiple physical understandings.”

This approach informs The Female has Undergone Several Manifestations, an exhibition that aims to presents a total understanding of the body, its internal and social functioning in and amongst its growing, evolving habitat.

“Like a graduated colour spectrum—these sculptures and images illuminate a sense of becoming.”

Artspace director Misal Adnan Yıldız will be in conversation with Alicia Frankovich on the occasion of The Female has Undergone Several Manifestations at Starkwhite. (6 pm Monday, February 8, 2016 at Starkwhite).

For further information and high-res images please contact the gallery.

Fiona Pardington | The Popular Recreator

11 - 23 December 2015

Fiona Pardington has created a new suite of photographs fired onto high quality ceramic plates, cups and saucers revisiting a technique she used in the early nineties. The works respond to the steel engravings illustrated in a rare encyclopaedic publication The Popular Recreator A Key To In-Door And Out-Door Amusements Vols. 1 And 2 1873/1874. Fiona’s investigations are concerned with how skill-focused pastimes are disappearing due to modern technology and highlight how profoundly contemporary notions of masculinity and femininity have diverged from the Victorian period.

Fiona's comprehensive survey A Beautiful Hesitation, curated by Aaron Lister, received an outstanding response during it’s time at City Gallery Wellington and we look forward to seeing it at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki late February 2016. To coincide with the opening a new book will be published that brings together new and classic writings on the artist’s work, published by Victoria University Press.

Gavin Hipkins | Block Paintings

4 November – 5 December 2015

Gavin Hipkins' new series documents readymade children's wooden play blocks that he has hand painted, and assembled on the studio table for photographing in close-up. The series explores a psychology where the artist turns child at play in the studio — embellishing toyshop play blocks in different colours than their generic stock hues, then treating the blocks as still life material.

Photographed with a macro lens and greatly enlarged, the photos resemble abstract paintings, and echo the minimal designs of New Zealand’s grandfather of geometric abstraction, Gordon Walters. Except where Walter’s works were clean and sharp, in Block Paintings brush strokes, paint drips, and imperfections on the painted surfaces are revealed through the verisimilitude of a photographic surface. The narrow depth of field builds a tension between an ultra precise surface detail on the blocks, with a blurring of surrounding focal planes.

“Sitting between sculpture, painting, and photography, I like to think of these new works as representations of ‘kinder monuments’ — a reference to their ambiguous scale, and the occupation of the field plane by massively enlarged brutalist wooden blocks,” says Hipkins. “The toy blocks are photographed on my studio table under natural lighting conditions. This treatment of isolated objects recalls tabletop still life traditions, as well as product photography used for advertising commodities. Yet by photographing the arrangements under natural light conditions, rather than the clinical lighting of the photographic studio, there is a clear painterly treatment.”

True to the status of paintings and handcrafted conventions, the new works ignore the very reproducibility of a photographic ontology, instead, these works are presented as unique photographic prints. Hipkins' return to the still-life genre and a strategy of photographing humble painted objects in the studio, builds on important works including his multipart photo-installations The Colony (2002) and The Pavilion (2011). He positions the Block Painting series as extending his navigation of modernity and photography via referencing eclectic pictorial strategies, and revisiting an avant-garde utopianism. The later exploration has included repeated photographic series of late modern and Brutalist architecture in series such as the multi-panel documentation of Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh in Leisure Valley (2014), and his earlier photo-frieze of New Zealand tertiary institutions in The Habitat (2000).

Gavin Hipkins is an Auckland-based artist who works with photography and moving image. He has been described as a ‘tourist of photography’ reflecting a strategic treatment of eclectic styles and diverse photographic techniques. Over the last two decades his practice has engaged landscape and commodity discourses via a range of analogue and digital technologies, photo-installations, and artist videos. In 2014, Hipkins’ first feature film Erewhon — an essay adaptation of Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon, Or Over the Range — premiered at the New Zealand International Film Festival and Edinburgh Art Festival.

He represented New Zealand at the 1998 Sydney Biennale, and the 2002 Sao Paulo Biennale. His work is included in major public and private collections including the Queensland Art Gallery, the Auckland Art Gallery, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts, and George Eastman Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York. He is an Associate Professor at Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland’s Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists’ projects, solo shows by represented and invited artists, and independently curated exhibitions.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

Gordon Walters: Gouaches and a Painting from the 1950s

21 September – 24 October 2015

This exhibition has been curated for Starkwhite by Laurence Simmons, one of New Zealand's foremost scholars on the work of pioneering abstract artist Gordon Walters. It is presented in partnership with the Walters Estate and with the support of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery where the Estate's extensive holdings of artworks and archival material are being housed and cared for under a long-term agreement between the two parties.

There are three important sources that inform Walters’ gouache works, which were mostly painted over a decade at night while he worked for the Government Printing Office during the day. First of all, Walters had worked his way aboard ship to London in 1950. In 1951 on a continental excursion, he was exposed first-hand to the geometrical abstractions of Auguste Herbin, Alberto Magnelli and Victor Vasarely at the Denise René Gallery in Paris; and then the works of Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg in The Hague, Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Secondly, into this heady engagement with European modernity upon his return to New Zealand Walters was to inject his prior interest in the field of Maori rock art. During the summer of 1946-47 he had worked closely alongside Indonesian expatriate Theo Schoon recording Maori rock drawings in the limestone bluffs and shelters of South Canterbury, places which Schoon majestically described as ‘New Zealand’s oldest art galleries’. The rock-art depiction of human and animal figures with blank centres inspired the geometry and interlocking structures of stylized anthropomorphic figures that were to appear later in many of Walters’ gouaches. Thirdly, in 1953 Schoon had also introduced Walters to the work of Rolfe Hattaway, a permanently hospitalised psychiatric patient whose drawings made with a lump of clay on the asphalt of an exercise yard had captivated Schoon when employed as an orderly at the Avondale psychiatric hospital. Schoon provided Hattaway with art materials and later he and Walters copied Hattaway’s loopy tumults of line, in particular the repeated motif of a long open rectangle penetrated by a curving snake-like form. The importance for Walters of this positive form penetrated by a negative emptiness was now confirmed for him from an arresting double source: rock art and outsider art. These two tours de force dramatise the radical aesthetics of Walters’ fifties gouaches that willfully blur the differences between abstraction and nature.

Walters’ rapid study gouaches of the 1950s called for a certain tenacity of purpose, sustained analysis and prolonged concentration. They yielded a surprising narrative of astonishing range, providing images and compositions that would carry Walters through the decades to follow. Years later he was still using motifs he had stored in his visual memory from the fifties. For the paradox remains that in such an elaborated intellectual practice of painting as Walters’ so many of the key effects and decisions are derived from moments of pure coincidence and inspiration. Walters’ best works of this period are permanently embroiled in the present tense of their making; they would be just as fresh as if created today or tomorrow.

Laurence Simmons, September 2015

Gordon Walters is best known for his paintings employing the koru, the curving bulb form from Maori moko and kowhaiwhai rafter patterns. He is a revered figure in New Zealand, recognised for a long and productive career spanning four decades. The Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki presented a retrospective exhibition his work in 1983 and a survey exhibition Parallel Lines in 1994, and he has been included in many survey shows, including A Very Peculiar Practice: Aspects of Recent New Zealand Art at the City Gallery, Wellington. In 2014 Starkwhite and the Walters Estate presenteda small survey show of his koru paintings at Art Basel Hong Kong. Walters is represented in the country’s major public collections and his place in our art history is memorialised in the bi-annual Walters Prize exhibition and award at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki.

Laurence Simmons is Associate Dean (Postgraduate) and Professor of Film Studies in the School of Social Sciences at The University of Auckland. He has written extensively on contemporary New Zealand art and photography and his latest two books are Tuhituhi (2011), on the painter William Hodges who journeyed with Captain James Cook on his second voyage to the South Pacific, and Blutopia (2014), on the artist John Reynolds.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland’s Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists’ projects, solo shows by represented and invited artists, and independently curated exhibitions.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

Fiona Pardington | Childish Things

12 August - 19 September 2015

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

King James Bible "Authorized Version", Cambridge Edition

Childish Things is the first solo presentation of Fiona Pardington's work at Starkwhite and it opens on the eve of her survey exhibition at City Gallery Wellington.Her photographs take as their starting point material from the archive of Dr Alfred Charles Barker (1819-1873) held by the Canterbury Museum. Dr Barker was the ship’s surgeon on board the Charlotte Jane, one of the Canterbury Association's "First Four Ships", but he is better known for his remarkable photographs of early Christchurch. During a visit to the Museum in 2009, curator Natalie Cadenhead introduced Pardington to the letters of Dr Barker's children to their uncle Matthias, which they wrote during the 1860s. The letters provide an engaging record of childhood in colonial Canterbury and also speak of Dr Barker's friends Walter Lawry Buller, Johann Franz Julius von Haast and their discoveries.

Pardington says: “I was drawn in by the delicate fine paper, iron gall inks, smudged and blotched marks, spelling mistakes and a smeared fingerprint -a tanatalising forensic touch.I immediately had an aching feeling in my bones, for the land, the birds impacted by the Pākehā kids and their guns, gulls and adventures. I could feel their father standing there with his camera, and marvelled at the wobbly copperplate words giving a rare and earnest view into a child's world in the Christchurch bush teeming with a luxuriance of native wildlife I could only mourn today. I was equally horrified and fascinated that the Barker children's daily activities seemed to centre on killing: tracking, shooting, skinning birds all day, punctuated by looking for flowers and falling out of trees, all of which seemed to qualify them as junior naturalists in the ways of their father's friends Mr Buller and Mr Haast. We read in these children's stories to their Uncle a softly reflected, innocently faceted view of important men looking for Moa, the siblings finding puffballs and rowboats, and their father taking photographs."

In Motion

Starkwhite is pleased to present In Motion, an exhibition exploring various approaches to composing or choreographing color, motion and movement with works by Rebecca Baumann and Brendan Van Hek (AUS), Alicia Frankovich (DE), Len Lye (NZ), Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (US) and Grant Stevens (AUS).

Rebecca Baumann and Brendan Van Hek both explore the relationship between colour, light and time in their work. In this exhibition they present a collaborative work made for Colour Restraint at Sydney's Campbelltown Arts Centre. Untitled (2015) is an floor installation of coloured acrylic panels mounted on aluminium frames that stand facing each other - one pink, one blue and one yellow – to create an experiential piece. Reflecting on each other from various viewpoints, the acrylic panels mix up colours, forming shades of purple, green and red. The various combinations of reflective surfaces rely on audience interaction to create expanded space as a reflection of a reflection of a reflection, and to affect movement through the exhibition.

Alicia Frankovich has positioned herself as an artist working at the intersection of performance and sculpture. “The transformation of physicality into sculpture is one striking aspect of her work,” says Christina Lehnert, curator of the forthcoming exhibition 120% at the Gebert Foundation for Culture in Switzerland, which will feature existing and new sculpture by Frankovich. “Here, moments of bodily experience are transformed into various materials, or conversely these experiences are transformed into movements, and then back into sculptural moments.” In Motion features Frankovich's The Female Has Undergone Several Manifestations (2015), a shimmering sheer black-gradating-to-blue-to-red curtain undulating gently in the breeze of a stainless steel fan, placed close to the chromatically matching photograph Becoming Public: Actor (2015), which protrudes 40° from the wall on one side.

Len Lye composed color and motion to extraordinary effect in his films. A COLOUR BOX (1935) earned him a special place in film history as the first ever 'direct film', made without a camera by painting images directly on celluloid. Lye's film was screened in cinemas throughout Britain and was seen, according to British film historian David Curtis,“by a larger public than any experimental film before it, and most since.” A COLOUR BOX won a Medal of Honour at the 1935 International Cinema in Brussels. Having no suitable category in which to award the film, the jury simply invented a new one. In the following year, when presented at the Venice Film Festival, the screening had to be stopped because of a noisy demonstration by fascists and Nazis who condemned the film as “degenerate art” because of its modern style. A COLOUR BOX (1935) is presented in In Motion courtesy of the Len Lye Foundation and the British Postal Museum and Archive, from material preserved by the BFI National Archive and made available by Nga Taonga Sound and Vision. The Len Lye Foundation also acknowledges the support of Technix Group Ltd.

In 1927, four years after he joined the faculty of the Bauhaus school in Weimar Germany, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy published Malerie, Fotografie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film). In this influential book – part of a series he co-edited with Walter Gropius, director of the Bauhaus – he asserted that photography and cinema had heralded a “culture of light” that had overtaken the most innovative aspects of painting. Moholy-Nagy extolled photography – and film, by extension – as the quintessential medium of the future. His interest in the movement of objects and light through space led him to construct Light Prop for an Electric Stage (Light-Space Modulator). This object is the subject of Ein Lichtspiel: schwarz weiss grau (A Lightplay: Black White Grey), Moholy-Nagy's only abstract film, which synthesizes his attempts to visualize the act of seeing from multiple viewpoints. Ein Lichtspiel: schwartz weiss grau (A Lightplay: Black White Grey) is presented in In Motion courtesy of the Moholy-Nagy Foundation.

Grant Stevens is known for his videos featuring texts sourced from TV, movies and the Internet, but he also works with a variety of media, including lenticular prints as seen in this exhibition. Particle Wave (2012)is comprised of six lenticular panels hung in an even, horizontal sequence. Each panel alternates between two solid colour fields as you move past it. There are six colours in total, with each colour represented twice in the spectrum. From left to right, the panels move through yellow, orange, magenta, violet, blue, green and back to yellow. The work’s title refers to the two competing theories of light, which can be understood as either paradoxical or complementary. Like these theories, the experience of viewing the work catches us in a double bind. While we can orient ourselves to see solid colour fields one by one, we are never able to fully capture them all at once. In fact, it is only through our continual movement, and the subsequent transitioning of visible colours that we register the complete spectrum. Through this viewing experience, Particle Wave actively engages with our peripheral vision and the transitory nature of perception. It plays with the fundamental pleasures of colour and vision, and the uneasy seduction of being unable to grasp multiple phenomena simultaneously.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland’s Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists’ projects, solo shows by represented and invited artists, and independently curated exhibitions.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

Rebecca Baumann and Brendan Van Hek, Untitled, 2015

Rebecca Baumann and Brendan Van Hek, Untitled, 2015

Rebecca Baumann and Brendan Van Hek, Untitled, 2015

Rebecca Baumann and Brendan Van Hek, Untitled, 2015

Len Lye, F9061 - A COLOUR BOX (1935) is presented in In Motion courtesy of the Len Lye Foundation and the British Postal Museum and Archive, from material preserved by the BFI National Archive and made available by Nga Taonga Sound and Vision. The Len Lye Foundation also acknowledges the support of Technix Group Ltd.

Len Lye, F9061 - A COLOUR BOX (1935) is presented in In Motion courtesy of the Len Lye Foundation and the British Postal Museum and Archive, from material preserved by the BFI National Archive and made available by Nga Taonga Sound and Vision. The Len Lye Foundation also acknowledges the support of Technix Group Ltd.

Laith McGregor | Somewhere Anywhere

Self-portraits and portraits of friends and family have been a re-occurring feature of Laith McGregor’s work, but he puts his own distinctive spin on portraiture. As writer Helen Hughes says in an article published in ARTAND: “What begins as facial studies slowly morph into strangely hypnotic representations as McGregor alters the scale of certain features and allegorically combines his photographic realism with fragments of history, fiction, popular culture and other mythologies.”

During his recent travels in South East Asia, including a twelve-month stay in Bali, McGregor has been exploring the conceptual foundations of portraiture, from primitive mark making through to contemporary practice, and the discourses surrounding it. This has enabled him to revisit and rethink his practice while being immersed in various cultural communities.

McGregor says: “The body of work presented in this exhibition is an outcome of my ongoing research to understand the complexity of the human experience and my place within it, in particular investigating the relationship of various interpretations of portraiture as a common vernacular, through the use of masks, deities and notion of the self.”

With this new body of work and cast of other worldly characters McGregor creates his own mythology to explore the nature of humanity.

“Myths are always explanatory, they are the basis of understanding the relationship between people and their natural environment, they reflect the local conditions, climate, celestial phenomena, seasonal variations, the birth-death-rebirth experience and the need for humanity to establish a working relationship with these humanities.” J C Cooper

Laith McGregor has been represented in many solo and group shows in Australia and overseas. Recent exhibitions include: The Red Queen, Museum of Old and New (MONA), Tasmania, curated by Nicole Durling (2014); Art & Australia Collection 2003-2013, a travelling exhibition; Conquest of Space, University of NSW Gallery, curated by Andrew Frost (2014); and Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria (2013-2014).

He has been the recipient of numerous awards and including: the Australia Print Workshop Collie Print Trust Fellowship; National Works on Paper Prize, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery; and the Art & Australia/Credit Suisse Private Banking Contemporary Art Award. And he has undertaken residencies at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; the Australia Council’s studio in Barcelona; and at the Centre Intermondes in La Rochelle, France.

McGregor’s work is represented in the following collections: Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; The National Art Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane; and the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.

TOTEM presents works by two of our most influential artists: Arnold Manaaki Wilson whom Jonathon Mane-Wheoki referred to as the godfather of contemporary Māori art; and Billy Apple whose ground-breaking work can be seen currently in his retrospective Billy Apple®: The Artist Has to Live Like Everybody Else, curated by Christina Barton for the Auckland Art Gallery.

The Starkwhite exhibition pairs works which arise from two sculptural traditions—modernism where emphasis is placed on the autonomy of the art object, and conceptual art, which focuses on the idea as a dematerialized work-of-art. The form of both artists’ works is derived from trees—Wilson’s pou whenua function as posts or markers in the landscape and come from Tāne, the Māori god of the forest; and Apple utilizes the in-situ columns in Starkwhite’s main gallery, which are loosely descended from the Doric order of classical Greek architecture.

Wilson created a series of five works with pou whenua from 1980 to 1994. The first, exhibited here at Starkwhite, was a group of three which represent Māori ancestral figures. The tallest, Haumia, is god of wild, uncultivated, growing things and is associated with ferns. Haumia has two children, Rangitiina and Tiiniia and together, grouped as a family talking amongst themselves, they signify regeneration. They are carved using power tools and painted in the artist’s signature modernist Māori style, reminiscent also of early European ‘primitivism’. Red, black and white symbolise the female, male and spiritual energy harnessed and channeled, “unseen but felt” according to Wilson, from sky to ground in a cyclic model.

The modernist notion of autonomy is complicated by the pou whenua’s cultural role. Wilson intended for them to be installed outdoors to mark particular sites so they are able to operate spiritually and symbolically. It is his aim that through them we recognize that we must take care of the ecosystems which nature has devised to ensure earth’s vitality.

In a 2000 interview, the artist discussed Haumia, Rangitiina and Tiiniia, 1980 and their tour to Japan, Singapore and Australia, which he recalled was organised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They were also exhibited in San Diego during the 1988 America’s Cup yacht race. Repainted in 1996 by Wilson, the pou whenua were purchased by the current owner from the first sculpture exhibition held at the Becroft garden, Auckland, raising funds for the North Shore Women’s Refuge. The group is now in transit after a 17 year sojourn amongst native plants in Wellington where they have developed a rugged environmental patina. Leaning temporarily against Starkwhite’s wall, they are ready to move to a new location.

While Arnold Wilson’s pou whenua focus on regeneration in nature, Billy Apple’s work, The Divine Proportion, represents the golden ratio as a logarithmic growth spiral, examples of which can be seen in nature in the geometric patterns of sunflower seeds and unfurling fern fronds.

Apple uses the golden ratio of 1: 618 as a readymade conceptual system in many facets of his life—for example as a compositional tool, a business plan as well as the proportions of ingredients in his Apple’s Blend coffee and Billy’s Tea. His first use of the ratio in a work was in 1986 when he represented it as percentages in AC/DC (Artist’s Cut / Dealer’s Cut), a small hand painted (by Apple) canvas divided into 61.8% and 38.2%, which was recently acquired by the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.

At Starkwhite, Apple divides the two columns up into the artist’s cut and dealer’s cut percentages. Starkwhite’s share is white and remains part of the gallery architecture, while Apple demonstrates his by painting it yellow, like a 3-D bar graph. This is a site-specific work. It is the idea that we are here to contemplate­—the instrinsic relationship between artist and dealer that is the conceptual support structure of any dealer art gallery.

By the late 1960s, Apple was producing site-specific installations. ‘Site-specific’ back then was a New York term which referred to idea-driven works that dealt with gallery architecture. Apple’s first use of columns was in his 1975 work Circular Subtraction at Martha Jackson West, New York. He removed a strip of paint from around the central column with a disc sander. His first painted pillar was a 1979 red ‘censure’—a critique of its intrusion into the exhibition space at the Bosshard Galleries in Dunedin.

But the actual precedent to Starkwhite’s work is Pie Charts and Bar Graphs at Mori Gallery, Sydney, where in 1997 he divided up the gallery’s two columns into the golden ratio. Apple had them painted in fluorescent red then placed gold acrylic pie charts (that defined the 61.8% and 38.2% of the area of the columns’ footprint) strategically on the wall. The whole installation could be read as a geometric representation of the golden rectangle.

In curating together the works by both artists’, we can appreciate their individual approaches to art as well as contemplate the depth and significance of their contributions to culture. The concept of totem symbolizes a clan’s guardian—the ancestral father. The dialectic between a clan and its totemic idea serves to protect, teach and successfully structure its social system. In Freudian terms, a totem is the psychological stand-in for the father. So if we consider that art is a tribe, then we can posit that both Arnold Manaaki Wilson, as an artist Kaumatua, and Billy Apple® are totemic figures within our milleu.

Group Show

Martin Basher | Jizzy Velvet

3 February - 14 March 2015

Starkwhite is pleased to debut its 2015 season with a new exhibition by Martin Basher titled Jizzy Velvet.

The New York-based artist will present a series of large-scale paintings on canvas and cardboard, along with new sculptural works referencing store-display and retail architecture. Rendered primarily in black and white, the paintings represent a significant evolution to the signature series of optically complex, striped abstract paintings that Basher has become known for in recent years. While some works will continue to develop this flawless, hard-edged stripe motif, others will take a muscular formal turn, using the stripe in conjunction with more aggressive, tactile and improvisational mark making. Their compositions will be echoed and reflected in sculptures constructed from aluminum, perspex and heavy construction lumber.

John Reynolds BLUTOPIA

19 December 2014

Starkwhite is pleased to launch John Reynolds new publication Blutopia at the gallery from 5pm on Friday the 19th of December. For this one night event the set of 60 works featured in the book will also be presented and available for purchase alongside the catalogue for $550 including framing. In keeping with earlier Reynolds' publications each accompanying catalogue features a uniquely overworked cover.

John Reynolds' Blutopia: a new book by John Reynolds in association with Arch MacDonnell and Laurence Simmons. Proudly published by 6pt Press.

For further information please contact the gallery.

Seung Yul Oh memmem

Following on from Oh's recent large-scale survey show MOAMOA at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and the City Gallery Wellington, memmem shows Oh again working seamlessly across media, this time combining a suite of minimalist paintings with a cluster of pastel-hued acorn sculptures. The two bodies of work operate as independent yet harmonious lines, recomposing the gallery into a space for what he describes as "moments of balance and counterpoint between art object and audience, between individuals and groups, and between different cultures." With memmem, Oh creates an active, participatory space, allowing viewers to achieve a sense of empathy with the work, with each other and the worlds they move through.

At the opening of memmem on Friday 31 October, the directors of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Cam McCracken, and the City Gallery Wellington, Elizabeth Caldwell, will launch their new publication MOAMOA, which has been produced with the generous support of the Jan Warburton Charitable Trust and the Asia New Zealand Foundation.

Born in Seoul, Korea in 1981, Seung Yul Oh moved to New Zealand 15 years ago and completed an MFA at Auckland University's Elam School of Fine Arts. He now divides his time between Auckland and Seoul.

In 2010 Oh was invited by Korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa to take up a residency at the artist-run space GGOOL in Seoul and he was the recipient of the 2011 Harriet Friedlander New York Residency Award administered by the Arts Foundation of New Zealand.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

Gavin Hipkins Erewhon

31 October - 29 November 2014

Erewhon: The Book of the MachinesStarkwhite is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Gavin Hipkins. Realised in conjunction with the artist's recently completed feature length essay film Erewhon, the exhibition features a new suite of photographs presented alongside a video calling on the key chapter The Book of the Machines taken from Samuel Butler's 1872 novel Erewhon. For the artist, "Butler's poetic meditations on industrial society and colonialism remain a timely reflection on contemporary society and our technological dependencies."

Produced over a two-year period and shot in New Zealand, Australia, and India, Erewhon is the artist's first feature film. Gavin Hipkins is an Auckland-based artist who works with photography and moving image. His work has been exhibited widely. Recent international screenings and exhibitions include: Museum of Arts and Design, New York, USA (2014); City Art Centre and Filmhouse Cinema, Edinburgh Arts Festival, Scotland (2014); Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Germany (2013); Armory Film, The Armory Show, New York (2012); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2011); Austrian Museum of Applied Art and Contemporary Art (MAK), Vienna, Austria (2011).

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

Rebecca Baumann Once More With Feeling

19 September - 18 October 2014

Starkwhite is pleased to present Once More With Feeling an exhibition by Perth-based artist Rebecca Baumann from 20 September to 18 October, 2014.

"There is something intensely joyous in Rebecca Baumann's artworks, celebratory moments of colour and action and curious puzzles that can, intriguingly, never be solved," says critic John Barrett-Leonard. "She mixes intense colour, simple mechanical devices and moments of time, or perhaps moments out of time, in creating artworks that use colour and motion to point within, at a complex and varying field of emotion and experience."

Once More With Feeling presents a new installation created using a repurposed trivision billboard. The rotating prisms ofiridescent acrylic project kaleidoscopic beams of light across the floor and onto the gallery walls. As Consuelo Cavaniglia says, "there is the interplay between natural and manufactured in that we see rainbows, but they come from refractions off plastic surfaces, rather than sunshine on water droplets. The work carries the irony of experiencing something mesmerising, miraculous even, but that which is plugged in, switched on and mechanised".

Rebecca Baumann's project has been supported by the State Government of Western Australia through the Department of Culture and the Arts.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

SIGNALS

08 August - 13 September 2014

Starkwhite is located in Auckland, a multi-cultural city with a rapidly changing demographic, where the mix of European, Maori and Pacific Island cultures is being enriched by new New Zealanders, notably from Asia.

In 1991 little more than 5 percent of Aucklanders were Asian. In 2006, the figure was 19%, rising to 25% this year, and it is likely to be around 30% by 2020 - an extraordinary level of growth. Asian communities are easily the city's fastest-growing.

Signals responds to the changing face of Auckland, bringing together artworks by Asian artists who show with Starkwhite, along with others whose work engages with traditional and contemporary art practice in Asia - work that speaks to Auckland's Asian communities who form a growing audience for contemporary art, with the potential to expand the art market.

Inspired by the rich history of artistic exchange between New Zealand and Japan, artist Stella Brennan's works are a tribute to the traditional Japanese technique of Kintsugi and the practice of Ikebana, or Japanese flower-arranging. Kintsugi is a historic method of mending broken bowls and pots with layers of lacquer topped with gold leaf. This became so fashionable in Shogunate Japan that, allegedly, treasured tea bowls would get smashed just so they could be upcycled, kintsugi style. Ikebana has long fascinated the artist, particularly the way this sometimes austere, Buddhist-influenced practice became so imbedded in New Zealand in the 1950s and 60s, and still has a significant contemporary following.

Signals includes photographs of New Zealand landscape by shanghai-based artist Jin Jiangbo. He layers his own cultural landscape upon ours, to capture in the shanshui tradition New Zealand's mountains, oceans and beaches not with ink on paper but through the lens of a camera. Presenting the work in the style of a one and a half millennia old tradition, Jin Jiangbo gives it a cultural inflection that makes the unfamiliar familiar to Asian viewers and that allows New Zealanders to look through new cultural eyes - to look afresh at what we thought we knew.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows by represented and invited artists, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices.

Grant Stevens Hold Together, Fall Apart

Grant Stevens is known for his pithy text-based videos exploring vernacular and mass media truisms and recalling advertising, movie trailers and relaxation videos. Stevens trades in clichés, platitudes and stock phrases, but points to their richness, probing the overlap between mass media fictions and everyday reality. While some of his works play on language's slipperiness, others emphasise its hyper-lucidity. Against the backdrop of modern life's impossibly hyperactive schedules, his new works go fishing for personal reflection, self-expression, self-help, new age spirituality and other ways to get a grip.

In Haven, one of the new videos presented in the exhibition, a female voice guides the listener through a meditative sequence. As it progresses, the tone shifts from relaxation to seduction and, eventually, to hints of mild contempt. The voiceover is accompanied by an abstract animated form, which progressively morphs from geometric to irregular. Through its subtle shifts in tone and form, the work plays with the relationships between self-help, self-absorption and self-pity. Its verbal and visual references gently suggest a disjunction between internalised thoughts and external realities. In doing so, it also alludes to the ways that desire and doubt can inform quests for inner peace.

Grant Stevens' project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows by represented and invited artists, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

Michael Zavros Bad Dad

2 - 28 June 2014

Leading Australian artist Michael Zavros will exhibit for the first time with Starkwhite in Auckland in June 2014. While Zavros has exhibited previously in New Zealand at Auckland Artspace in 2005 (Uncanny (the unnaturally strange)), and at Govett Brewster Gallery, New Plymouth in 2007 (New Nature), this will be his first solo exhibition in New Zealand. Bad Dad brings together new paintings and drawings with a selection of important past works borrowed from private, public and the artist's own collections in a curated exhibition that will offer a New Zealand audience an introduction to the artist's rich and complex oeuvre.

Bad Dad features key paintings and drawings rendered with the artist's characteristic attention to fine detail, including the artist's self-portrait of the same name, from 2013, Phoebe is dead/McQueen from 2010, which won the prestigious Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, as well as the film We dance in the studio (to that shit on the radio), 2010, the only film the artist has made, which has been shown in museums throughout Australia and South East Asia.

New works produced for Starkwhite include Phoebe is eight/Tom Ford, 2014, a miniature painting that expands on an ongoing series of works the artist has made in collaboration with his eldest child, three of which are included in Bad Dad. The painting is emblematic of the artist's meditations on narcissism and vanity as well as fatherhood. Zavros observes that, "to some degree, the works collected here are all a form of self-portraiture. They elucidate something of my character and my ongoing critical concerns as an artist. They are the result of the intertwining of both."

These works will show alongside The Poodle, 2014 a still life featuring hydrangeas arranged in crystal vases to resemble a standard poodle, witty in its decadent allusions to art history. The Rabbit takes a similar approach with a sentimental sweetness that evokes something darkly Disney. Collectively these new works are a melange of baroque and pop influences. Zavros acknowledges the legacy of Jeff Koons, while considering the impermanence and folly of existence, and of art itself.

Zavros said, "I am excited to show with Starkwhite, a gallery with an exciting international focus and I am looking forward to working with them."

Bad Dad will be officially opened by Rhana Devenport, Director, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki on Saturday May 31 who is also contributing an interview with the artist for the exhibition catalogue.

Michael Zavros will also show with Starkwhite as part of the Melbourne Art Fair in August 2014.

Michael Zavros was born in 1974 and graduated from Queensland College of Art with a Bachelor of Visual Arts in 1996.

In 2012 Zavros was awarded the inaugural Bulgari Art Award through the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In 2010 he was awarded the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, the world's richest prize for portraiture. He has won three major Australian drawing prizes: the 2002 Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award, the 2005 Robert Jacks Drawing Prize and the 2007 Kedumba Drawing Award, and has been a multiple Archibald Prize finalist.

Zavros's group exhibitions include Wilderness at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2010, Scott Redford Vs Michael Zavros at the Institute of Modern Art, 2010, Contemporary Australia: Optimism at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2008, andPrimavera at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 2000.

Solo exhibitions include The Prince, Rockhampton Art Gallery touring to Griffith University Art Gallery 2013, The Good Son: Works on Paper, a survey exhibition in 2009 at Gold Coast City Art Gallery, Everything I wanted at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane in 2003/2004 and Egoisteat, Wollongong Regional Gallery, 2007.

He has been the recipient of several international residencies including the Australia Council Milan studio residency in 2001, and the Barcelona studio in both 2005 and 2010. In 2003 he was awarded a Cite International des Arts Residency in Paris through the Power Institute, University of Sydney. In 2004 he was awarded a studio residency at the Gunnery Studios, Sydney, from the NSW Ministry for the Arts.

In October 2014 he will take up the Australia Council Greene Street Studio n New York.

He has been the chosen for several commissions, the most recent of which is a portrait of Victoria Cross winner Ben Roberts-Smith for the Australian War Memorial.

His work is held in numerous private and public collections, including The National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Queensland Art Gallery, University of Queensland Art Museum, Tasmanian Museum and Gallery, Artbank, National Portrait Gallery, Collex, ABN AMRO, Griffith University Art Collection, Gold Coast City Art Gallery, Grafton Regional Art Gallery, Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Tweed River Art Gallery, Wollongong City Art Gallery.

THE ANALYSIS OF BILLY APPLE®

The Analysis of Billy Apple® stages the latest development in a ground breaking project that challenges our definitions of life and highlights cultural issues arising from the use and ownership of body tissue and genetic information.

It is a further development of The Immortalisation of Billy Apple®, a project by artist Billy Apple and scientist/artist Craig Hilton where art is in the service of science and science serves the artist to enhance and protect the artist's brand by immortalising his biological tissue in perpetuity. The immortalisation transaction ensures that the brand (and the artist) can theoretically last forever unconstrained by death as his virally transformed cells can now grow indefinitely in cell culture medium.

In 2012 Apple's cells were transferred as a living artwork to the American Type Culture Collection in Massachusetts (the world's premier biological culture repository established to carry out research to improve the propagation, preservation, classification, and characterization of cultures and to develop new and enhanced culture products). At the ATCC Apple's immortalised cell line is a resource available for both artists and scientists thereby creating further dialogue and interdisciplinary opportunities highlighting the ongoing nature of this project and immortality of these cells. As the cells usefulness increases, so does the significance and fame of the artist's biological tissue as copies of the artwork and the genetic material are exponentially reproduced globally.

Using material from his cell line, the artist has recently been immortalized in a different manner - by sequencing his entire genome and digitalising the results. The mass of data generated by NZ Genomics Ltd (University of Auckland, Massey University and the University of Otago) and recorded as The Digitalisation of Billy Apple® can be stored on infinite machines and analysed in countless ways. Studies that help us understand this data will continue to be updated.

In The Analysis of Billy Apple®, we present data in Billy Apple's genomic sequence that identifies among millions of genetic differences, those which correlate with known-published studies that associate these genetic differences with health predictions. These studies can be found in Whole Genome Association Studies databases. GWAS typically focus on associations between single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and traits like major diseases. We can follow Billy Apple®'s likelihood of certain physical (including health-related) traits on a curated resource of SNP-trait associations (NHGRI GWAS Catalog). Some of these traits have been already realized. GWAS help us estimate Billy Apple's risk of disease.

Here the artist confronts his own biology and possible future by seeing how he deviates genetically from known norms. This mirrors the situation that we all will face as individualized genomic data becomes cheaper and more accessible. The depth and complexity of it and almost daily discoveries means that there will be more and more known about our future health and ourselves, raising many ethical questions.

The Immortalisation project continues to explore important cultural implications regarding the use and ownership of body tissue, genetic information - issues that burden the development and use of biotechnology. In contrast to most donations, which are highly restricted, this tissue deliberately has no restrictions placed on its use.

I consent to the wide distribution of cell lines derived from my blood, including deposit with the American Type Culture Collection cell bank. I understand that this may enable unrestricted use of my cells in research outside my control, including the potential analysis of my DNA.-Billy Apple 12/05/2009

This is a reconceptualisation of tissue acquisition as an artistic transaction. Here, the artist takes the plunge into an inevitable future making public his tissue and along with it, his genetic information. In The Immortalisation of Billy Apple®, the name Billy Apple® Cell Line (listed with the American Type Culture Collection and therefore available for all researchers of all kinds) clearly identifies the donor. The artist/donor (and brand) waives his rights to privacy in the name of art. And in The Analysis of Billy Apple® the artist's genomic data is presented publicly in an exhibition at Starkwhite. This offers a stark contrast to the justifiable global anxiety surrounding the privacy of individual biological tissue, genetic and health information.

The influence of science and technology remains largely uncontested by culture. In the last thirty years, advances in molecular and cellular biology and the application of resulting technologies have vastly increased not just our understanding of the foundation and mechanisms of life, but also our ability to adjust life according to the whim and needs of this species.

In the wake of genomics, DNA synthesis, DNA editing, cloning technology, nano-medicine, tissue engineering, etc, it is anyone's guess what will be possible for this species in the future. These emerging technologies already seriously challenge our definitions of life. So while the rest of us live with an uneasy mix of fear and hope, the artist embraces the biotechnology age and possibilities it offers in the future, including the potential to move from theoretical to actual immortalisation.

The Immortalisation of Billy Apple® was first presented at Starkwhite from 6 -10 May 2010, followed by The Immortalisation of Billy Apple® (Part 2) from 19 - 21 April 2012. In May 2013 Starkwhite presented The Immortalisation of Billy Apple® (Part 3) at Art Basel Hong Kong.

BIOGRAPHIES

BILLY APPLE® NZ/USABorn 1935, Auckland. Rebranded 1962, London

In London in 1962, I began an extended work, which was part of an effort to break down the separation between "art activity" and "life activity". I decided to use my own identity as the vehicle with which to explore the concept of the artist as "art object".

-Billy Apple, 1974

Billy Apple is an art brand created in 1962 when the artist changed his name in a self-branding exercise as a work shortly after graduating from London's Royal College of Art. His six-decade art career began in London amidst the emergent Pop art scene then in 1964 he moved to New York where he exhibited in the Bianchini Gallery's legendary American Supermarket alongside the likes of Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. Next he rapidly established himself as a key figure in the development of Conceptual art, exhibiting in New York's museum, dealer gallery and alternative art scenes (including New Museum, Leo Castelli Gallery and Clocktower) and established APPLE (1969 -1973) one of the city's seven original not-for-profit spaces. His subsequent text-based works from the 80s onwards drew attention to art system relations between artist, dealer, and collector. He became a registered trademark in 2007, formalizing his art-brand status, which he has continued to explore through transaction-based works.

Apple exhibits regularly both locally and internationally. Recent survey exhibitions include the Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, 2009; Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, 2010 and The Mayor Gallery, London, 2010 and 2013. An upcoming survey exhibition is scheduled for March 2015 at the Auckland Art Gallery. Recent selected international exhibitions include When Britain Went Pop! British Pop Art: The Early Years, Christie's Mayfair, London, 2013; The Immortalisation of Billy Apple®, Starkwhite, Art Basel Hong Kong, 2013; Gold, Belvedere Palace Museum, Vienna, 2012; Howard Wise Gallery: Exploring the New, Moeller Fine Art, Berlin and New York, 2012; Museum in Agency of Unrealised Projects, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Kopfbau Basel, 2011 and Alternative Histories, Exit Art, New York, 2010. His work is held in public collections such as the Detroit Institute of Arts; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; National Gallery of Australia and Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand. Recent acquisitions include the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and Tate Britain.

CRAIG HILTON is a New Zealand scientist, artist and educator. After completion of a PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Otago, New Zealand, he took a position at Harvard Medical School and later at the University of Massachusetts as an oncologist and immunologist. He returned to New Zealand in 2003 and completed an MFA at the University of Auckland, Elam School of Fine Arts. He is interested in: the interaction of science and art, particularly art/science collaborations i.e. those with genuine art and science value/outputs; how art might be able to contribute to dialogue regarding science, molecular biology, biological discovery, biotechnology etc; and the cultural implications of these revolutionising technologies.

This ongoing project is entirely dependent on the goodwill and understanding of Professor Rod Dunbar, School of Biological Sciences, University of Auckland. The project collaborators also wish to acknowledge the support of Peter Tsai (University of Auckland), Daniel Verdon (University of Auckland), NZ Genomics Ltd (University of Auckland, Massey University and the University of Otago), UNITEC, Wystan Curnow, Mary Morrison, The American Type Culture Collection and Creative New Zealand.

Layla Rudneva-Mackay

17 March to 12 April 2014

Starkwhite is pleased to present Blue Squares, Purple Pairs by Layla Rudneva-Mackay from 17 March to 12 April 2014.

With this exhibition, Rudneva-Mackay presents a new suite of paintings of flowers reflecting her interest in what it means to show someone something rather than telling them. The act of observation and its material expression demands a radical slowness and humility of gesture - painted or otherwise - and the steady, abstracting attention of the eye…all things that define Rudneva-Mackay's practice.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows by represented and invited artists, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices.

Starkwhite is pleased to start the 2014 season with Lovers, a late-summer group show curated by gallery artist Martin Basher.

Picking up on the semantic slippage of the show's title, Lovers is a paean to beauty for the romantic viewer and an illicit assignation with visual pleasure for the serious conceptualist. Featuring work by eleven of Basher's New Zealand and American contemporaries along with Basher himself, Lovers hones in on the physical and tactile elements of the work by this varied and intergenerational group, finding material and conceptual affinities connecting work that is otherwise separated by geography, time and conceptual focus. Lovers is a show with the tenor of sunsets, long cocktails, and holidays drawing to a close, and in this atmosphere, the works in the show find intimate common ground in the visceral and sensate, their relationships immediate and intense; summer lovers for a month.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows by represented and invited artists, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

Glen Hayward I don't want you to worry about me

Starkwhite is pleased to present I don't want you to worry about me, I have met some Beautiful People, a project produced by Glen Hayward during his Rita Angus Residency in 2012 and exhibited at the City Gallery Wellington and Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu's project space in 2013.

Hayward is known for his sculptures of everyday, mass-produced items. Carved from wood and painted exactly as they were as found objects, they masquerade as the real. Aaron Lister, curator of Hayward's exhibition at the City Gallery Wellington, says: "Hayward's acts of making, re-making and re-presentation variously render these objects and the world they belong to strange, hilarious or threatening. These objects are returned to the world, but now as simulations that perfectly replicate the original yet are devoid of any utilitarian or functional purpose they might once have held. Hayward's practice endlessly upsets our relationship to the things that surround us, disrupting those divisions we make between art and lived experience."

With his solo exhibition I don't want you to worry about me, I have met some Beautiful People, Hayward turns his hand to the cubicle spaces of the white-collar worker. However, this is not just any cubicle, but a faithful recreation of the iconic office scene from The Matrix, in wood. The film's Mr Anderson has clocked out, but leaves behind those lingering questions about what is real and what is illusory, between virtual experience and physical experience, individual agency and social control, issues that flow through The Matrix and Hayward's practice.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows by represented and invited artists, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

Matt Henry High Fidelity

16 November - 14 December 2013

Starkwhite is pleased to present High Fidelity by Matt Henry from 16 November to 14 December 2013.

In his first solo show at Starkwhite, Henry assembled a small group of paintings and sculptures reflecting his interest in art, design and consumerism. Installed in two galleries, each the mirror image of the other, the exhibition played on the notion of the doppelgänger, exploring the formal similarities and interconnectedness of art and design through the minimalist aesthetic.

Utilizing the same gallery space, Henry presents a new suite of paintings that engage with the legacy of minimalism and design. Concentrating on the picture frame as an integral element in the 'design' of his paintings, the works in High Fidelity focus on the formal and mimetic possibilities of the frame, rather than the frame as embellishment or protection.

Henry's minimalist-like paintings characteristically subvert conventions of display and construction in order to play upon references to non-objective art and minimalist product design. Willingly inviting uncertainty to the reading or perception of the work, Henry describes his practise as an "incongruous mix of the languages of 20th century abstraction, conceptualism and 21st century design."

Tracing the process of commodification and semiotic re-coding, the works play upon the contextual openness of reductive or minimal art. Exploring the origins, histories and contradictions imbedded in the minimalist idiom, Henry's investigation endeavours to decode and record the vagaries of these forms and their shifting social/political value.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices. Starkwhite also represents artists from New Zealand, Asia and the Pacific-rim.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

Richard Maloy All the things I did by Richard Maloy

4 - 30 November 2013

Starkwhite is pleased to present All the things I did by Richard Maloy, a project developed with the support of Creative New Zealand, from 4 - 30 November 2013

Richard Maloy's first solo exhibition at Starkwhite consists of a suite of studio spaces typical of Western art schools in recent times. A closer look, however, reveals this to be a recreation of Maloy's own student spaces, each displaying examples of his student work between 1996-2001, which he retained as an archive. No stranger to creating structures and installations that offer playful and sometimes awkward encounters, All the things I did is a self-styled history of sorts, or memoir of turning points in the artist's early career.

With its partitioned walls and art school studio tables displaying photographs, videos, text and objects, Maloy offers a stage on which to present his archive as an artwork. Never intended for viewing outside the confines of the art school environment, it now reveals how Maloy and his contemporaries were influenced by the art school paradigm and contemporary teachings. All the things I did acts as an archive of a student's work within a western arts education system as the world moved from the 20th into the 21st century.

The installation also highlights his development as an artist and re-conceptualises his current practice, presenting a new framework to see both within. The reworking of his back catalogue in this way offers a fresh insights into works such Big Yellow, a two story high yellow mass with interior space commissioned by QAG|GOMA for the 2012 Asia Pacific Triennial, and the video piece As Many Structures As I Can (2008) in which Maloy begins with a pristine set of building blocks made from butter and reworks and manipulates them endlessly with his bare hands until the material collapses into a formless abstraction of texture and colour.

The approach to a more formal engagement with existing material that All the things I did presents also echoes recent projects,such as Attempts (2010). Eliciting a surprising lyricism that echoes an Abstract aesthetic, the series of photographs utilises thedebris of fine art students' production process as their subject matter. Maloy is not one for indulging or strengthening the canon, however, his usual style is to evoke then quickly destablise it, employing unlikely materials and processes to create a diverse body of work that acts as a type of private action or intention made public.

Over the past decade, Richard Maloy has staged over ten solo shows and been included in over forty group exhibitions. Some of the highlights include;Toi Aoteraoa: Works from the Collection, Auckland Art Gallery (2011/12); Green Structure Part Two,SCAPE Biennial(2011), curated by Blair French; For Keeps: Sampling recent acquisitions from the Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery (2009), curated by Natasha Conland; New Work Old Work: Video Works from 1998-2008, New Zealand Film Archive Auckland (2009), curated with Siobhan Garrett; World Famous in New Zealand, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Australia (2005), curated by Stuart Bailey; and Remember New Zealand, Sao Paulo Biennial, Brazil (2004), curated by Tobias Berger.

In 2009, he was awarded the inaugural Fulbright-Wallace Award, which allowed him to spend five months in California in 2010 as a visiting Fulbright Scholar, and undertake a three-month artist residency at Headlands Center of the Arts in San Francisco.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows by represented and invited artists, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

Li Xiaofei

3 -26 October 2013

Starkwhite is pleased to present Assembly Line - Entrance by Li Xiaofei from 3 -26 October 2013.

Li Xiaofei (b. 1973) is a Chinese artist who lives and works in Shanghai. He graduated from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and is the founder and director of the Creek Art Center, Fei Contemporary Art Center (FCAC) Shanghai, and the Zendai Contemporary Art Exhibition Hall.

Li has been focusing on the Assembly Line project since 2010. He has visited hundreds of factories in the delta of the Yangtze River. He has filmed interviews and engaged in dialogues with people working at these sites for production.

The videos deliberately mix artistic and documentary language. Images of the individual and the machines are constantly being cut up, restructured, transformed and rebuilt into an evocative reality. This body of work explores a number of interlocking themes including the relationship between labour and management, between man and machine, between the factory and the individual and the relationship between the individual and society.

Li has been the recipient of grants and awards from multiple organizations, including Asia New Zealand Foundation Wellington Grants, New Zealand (2013), Iaspis International Residency Grant, Stockholm, Sweden (2013), the Sovereign Foundation Fellowship of Asian Cultural Council (Rockefeller Foundation), New York, USA (2011).

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows by represented and invited artists, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

John Reynolds Vagabondage

22 August to 21 September 2013

There's no such place as home. And we live there, you and me.

Philip Hoare, The Sea Inside

Starkwhite is pleased to present Vagabondage by John Reynolds from 22 August to 21 September 2013.

Reynolds' work resists summary. When people write about his project, they often make lists. In one short catalogue entry Allan Smith once described Reynolds as intoxicated, indecorous, hedonistic, romantic, sublime, mythopoetic, dithyrambic, epic and visionary, excessive and cloying, satanic and heavenly, and restless; his compositions as turbulent, angelic, chromatic, shimmering and exfoliating, internally stressed, externally unhinged, and ornamental; his iconography as reminiscent of blood vessels and hallucinated architecture.

Reynolds regularly combines overblown scale - the public address of billboards - with an arcane personal language, fugitive drawing style and obscure intentions. While the effect can be rich and ecstatic, materially the work can also be basic; it owes something to arte povera. Signs like crosses, scaffolds, veils, webs, knots, and road signs declare a fascination with pointers and a love of complexity. Echoes of the local play out against a signature toying with language and fragments of text.

Vagabondage locates key ley lines within this broader, shifting territory. It begins with Twilight of the Idols (1992), Hope Street(1997) and WORKS END (2008), and proceeds as a changing parade of major and minor moments in a practice that encompasses painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, performance and landscape works.

John Reynolds lives and works in Auckland. Solo shows include: The Art of War, ART HK, the international art fair of Hong Kong (2010); NOMADOLOGY [loitering with intent], Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (2010); 1001 Nights, The Amory Show, New York (2010); Table of Dynasties, ART HK, the international art fair of Hong Kong (2009); John Reynolds: Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas, a collaboration between the artist and actor/director Geraldine Brophy, Christchurch Art Gallery (2008); Speaking Truth to Power, Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland University (2007); HEVN: NOT TO SCALE, curated by Sophie McIntyre, Adam Gallery Victoria University, Wellington (2002): and From K Road to Kingdom Come, curated by Gregory Burke and Robert Leonard, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth (2001).

Reynolds is also the recipient of a Laureate Award from the Arts Foundation of New Zealand, a member of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery Foundation and the subject of Questions for Mr Reynolds, a TV documentary produced by Shirley Horrocks.

Clinton Watkins Frequency Colour

25 July to 16 August 2013

Starkwhite is pleased to present Frequency Colour by Clinton Watkins from 25 July to 16 August 2013.

A new work created for, and in reply to the distinctive characteristics of the Starkwhite gallery, Frequency Colour embraces the concept of space. Responding to the clean lines, pillars and sightlines of the gallery, Frequency Colour immerses the audience and manipulates their experience and environment via colour, sound and scale. Clinton Watkins is the artist behind a practice that is technically innovative yet also delights in analogue equipment. Producing artwork that investigates the affects combinations of sonic and visual information can have on an audience, he creates immersive and powerful aesthetic environments.

Recording short sound works - roughly the length of a pop song - and forcing them into advanced custom-made AV5-Error video manipulation hardware produces visual graphics created solely by the audio signal. Made in a live studio context in analogue they carry its warmth and process of chaos, fed through digital technology evolving into a real time visual abstraction. Keeping his compositions short is important to Watkins to retain the energy and impetus of the sound, which translates directly to the work's audience.

Drawing upon his background as a musician, Watkins blends the dynamism and noise generating capacity of diverse musical influences into stylish minimalist abstractions. His installations are elegant compositions themselves. Generated by pure tone frequencies, metronomic pulse wave clicks, white noise and feedback, the immersive visual component of Frequency Colour is composed of monochromes of broadcast colour tones. Projected colour fields appear, morph or evaporate, only to be replaced by others in a complex game of repetition and distortion broken by pulses of pure colour. The work is twinned then mirrored on to opposing walls, encasing its audience in a palette of sound and image for the duration of the 20-minute piece.

Watkins is also a practicing experimental musician who regularly produces and performs as a solo artist and collaboratively as an active member of the minimal electronic improvisation sextet, Plains, one half of the electronic noise duo 1000 and most recently working with artist Santiago Sierra. Watkins has numerous releases of recorded material published on a variety of local and international record labels such as Circle, 20 City, Claudia, Mystery Sea, CMR, Absurd and Scarcelight.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows by represented and invited artists, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

BAZINGA! curated by Robert Leonard

11 May - 8 June 2013

IMA Director Robert Leonard has curated an exhibition for Starkwhite to coincide with the opening of the Auckland Triennial in May. Titled Bazinga!-the notorious catchphrase of Dr Sheldon Cooper from the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory-the show will explore a geek sensibility in recent Australian art. It features work that touches on science (especially astrophysics) and science fiction (particularly Star Trek); on mathematics and statistics; on technology, computers, computer games, and the internet; and on obsessive fandom, autistic behaviour, social awkwardness, and inane pranks. The artists are Rebecca Baumann, Botborg, Antoinette J. Citizen, Gabrielle de Vietri, Danielle Freakley, Daniel McKewen, Ross Manning, Grant Stevens, and Stuart Ringholt.

Bazinga! opens Saturday 11 May at 5.30pm, with an audio-visual feedback performance by Botborg, at 7.00pm, and runs until 8 June.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows by represented and invited artists, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

Whitney Bedford: This for That

9 April - 4 May 2013

Starkwhite is pleased to present This for That, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Whitney Bedford from 9 April to 4 May 2013.

There is a mercurial quality to Whitney Bedford's work. Her paintings have a compositional turbulence and a distinctly ominous air - their listing ships, heavy seas, detached icebergs, temperamental landscapes and low horizons stirring up notions of the sublime - yet on closer look another language begins to emerge, one altogether more eloquent. Drawing on Bedford's architectural training, the works are first drafted in fluid, angular marks made with ink often lost in overpainting. Swiftly overlayed with an application of paint that is both beautiful and cruel as it actively creates and destroys, the gestural brushwork and dark ink offer crisp linearity with a capricious, smudgy chaser.

Presenting an overview of Bedford's diverse painting practice, the show also features a new and previously unseen body of work - paintings of artist biographies that surround the artist and punctuate the broader art world. These works, of seemingly ubiquitous art biographies, in this instance Duchamp and Rothko, can be read on many levels; they highlight the power of the image, comment on the superficiality of the artworld and question the role of scholarly knowledge, this seemingly anachronistic concept in this media-driven dumbed-down age.

Whitney Bedford received her MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2003. She was the winner of the 2001 UCLA Hammer Museum Drawing Biennale and received a Fulbright Graduate Fellowship from Hoschule der Kuenste, Berlin. Exhibitions include: Houdini: Art and Magic 1919-1949, The Jewish Museum, New York (2010); This is Killing Me at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams (2009); X - Snow Falls in the Mountains, St Pauls St Gallery, Auckland University of Technology (2007); Step into Liquid, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2006); The Triumph of Painting, part 5 Which Reality? The Saatchi Gallery London (2005). Whitney Bedford has had solo exhibitions at Susan Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles; Cherrydelosreyes Gallery, Los Angeles; D'Amelio Terras Gallery, New York; Art Concept, Paris and at Starkwhite, Auckland. This is her second solo exhibition at Starkwhite.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices. Starkwhite also represents artists from New Zealand, Asia and the Pacific-rim.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

Jin Jiangbo: Rules of Nature

8 March - 4 April 2013

Starkwhite is pleased to present Rules of Nature by Shanghai-based artist Jin Jiangbo from 8 March to 4 April 2013. The exhibition is presented in association with the Auckland Arts Festival 2013.

Blending imagery and sounds from traditional Chinese art forms with new-media technology, Jin Jiangbo's piece is executed in the manner of shanshui ink-and-wash paintings, an ancient style that first rose to prominence in the Liu Song Dynasty or 5thcentury AD. Using brush and ink on rice paper or silk, shanshui depicts landscapes where meandering paths, rivers and waterfalls are often prominent, along with mountains which have long been seen as sacred places in China. Drawing on this ancient tradition and employing interface software and technology, Jin Jiangbo presents his shanshui-inspired artwork in the gallery as a computer-driven video projection, allowing the delicate landscapes to be formed and re-formed in response to interactions by viewers.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows by represented and invited artists, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

Martin Basher

5 February to 2 March 2013

Starkwhite is pleased to launch its 2013 programme with a solo exhibition by Martin Basher, which runs from 5 February to 2 March.

In this exhibition, Basher continues his longstanding investigation into the ways which representations of the utopic and the sublime function in contemporary consumer society. Focusing on the use of imagery in commercial display, Basher's work explores the power of the image to evoke desire, seduce a viewer, and to stimulate 'consumer' response.

Basher uses a diverse range of source material including sunset beach-posters, exercise equipment, cut glass and crystal, liquor, vitamins and lottery tickets. In this exhibition, Basher draws on the color and form of these sources, approaching them from a primarily abstract standpoint.

Integral to the show are a new series of vivid, hard-edged abstract paintings in purple, black and white. The color of these works derives from the highly photoshopped saccharine beach imagery commonly used to sell romantic package holidays, alcoholic spirits and the like, while the work's abstract form bears a relationship to the fluorescent lighting, vertically-hung window blinds, and the angularity of storefront window display architecture. The paintings are the latest and largest of an ongoing series, the flawless atmosphere of sunset and vertical stripe motifs long being a presence in Basher's work.

The exhibition will also feature sculptural works made with fluorescent lights and architectural aluminum window trim. Arranged in vertical series like the stripes of the paintings, the lamps will cast the show in a high-spectrum artificial luminescence that is at once confrontational and blindingly seductive. Their industrial materials give reference to the modernist canon, while the scale and shape of the work gives nods to shop fittings.

In both paintings and sculptural works, the light and tenor of retail commerce is concentrated and focused to a destabilizing degree. These elegant paintings and objects may be interpreted through a critical lens concurrently as utilitarian display objects, and refined, meditative artworks.

New Zealand-born Basher divides his time between New York and Auckland, New Zealand. He received his BA in Fine Art (2003) and MFA (2008) from Columbia University in New York.

Billy Apple®: $9,020 AND $5,750 TOP UPS

In October 2005, Minter Ellison Rudd Watts advanced Billy Apple $100,000 credit for legal services for an artwork staged as a site-specific wall painting in the firm's reception area. The work confirmed the high value Minter Ellison Rudd Watts placed on its artist client and the firm's belief that its support of his work brings, so to say, credit to it.

$100,000 Credit Held has since become a cornerstone work in Apple's continuing series of transaction works, which describe and serve to contract the many and varied involvements of artworks in the process of exchange. Beginning with Art For Sale, 1981, with its focus on the artist's core business, Apple's transaction series has progressively and inventively extended its field of reference to cover all manner of everyday transactions, either under the general classification of the ongoing Paid, The Artists has to Live like Everybody Else series, or by individual arrangements (deals) whereby the artist receives, for instance, coffee, lunch or particular services, such as medical services or, in this case, legal services in exchange for works of his art.$100,000 Credit Held is a spectacular addition to Apple's continuing transaction works, not just because of the monetary value it represents, or the explicitness of the brand exchange ('credit where credit's due'), but because of the importance of the work to the management of his transaction portfolio and his brand name.

After 5 years much of the credit had been used up and discussions took place, which led to the title of the 2011 Starkwhite show Billy Apple®: $23,610 Top Up. As is his way, Apple had calculated his need for further credit by reference to the Golden Ratio. The particular sum was an agreed upon golden section of the agreement calculated by reference to the Golden Ratio. The exhibition featured the $23,610 Top Up canvas, along with four artworks documenting the purposes to which the artist's credit has been put. The artworks record the class of commodity for which Apple holds New Zealand trademark registration as a direct outcome of the advice and services provided by the Minter Ellison Rudd Watts intellectual propoerty team under the credit for legal services contract: Class 16 Printed Matter, Class 25 Clothing, Class 31, Fresh Fruit and Class 44 Orchard Services.

The current exhibition Billy Apple®: $9,020 and $5,750 Top Ups further extends the agreement with two golden section canvases and two additions to the Trademark Registration series: Class 32 Non Alcoholic Beverages and Class 33 Alcoholic Beverages.

In the brochure published to accompany the exhibition, Wystan Curnow writes: "The significance of these two Top Up exhibitions for the management of Apple's transaction and brand portfolio was attested to by the title of his 2009 double retrospective at Rotterdam's Witt de With, a leading European Centre for contemporary art: Billy Apple®. Also that of its first part, A History of the Brand 1962 - 2009. As Michelle Menzies writes in her catalogue essay 'At the moment of his name change he [the artist subsequently known as Apple] stopped being a person and became, instead, an aesthetic creation: an art thing whose most distinguishing feature is a requisite repetitiveness, the constant need to re-instantiate the implications of his own initiating act.' The Top Up exhibitions contextualise another name change, one by means of which Apple re-instantiates himself as intellectual property and provides one of our most redoubtable and innovative aesthetic enterprises with a fresh injection of conceptual capital."

Press release copy from Wystan Curnow's text in the brochure published by Starkwhite and Minter Ellison Rudd Watts to accompany Billy Apple®: $9,020 and $5,750 Top Ups.

The exhiibition runs to 24 August and can be viewed at the Minter Ellison Rudd Watts offices, Level 20, Lumley Centre, Shortland Street, Auckland between 9am and 5pm.

Billy Apple was created in 1962 as a work when Barrie Bates changed his name shortly after graduating from London's Royal College of Art. His six-decade art career began in London amidst the pioneers of pop art but he moved to New York in 1964 where he exhibited in the legendary American Supermarket exhibition (which included Jasper Johns, Claus Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselman) and then rapidly established himself as a key figure in the development of conceptual art. He exhibited in New York's museum, dealer gallery and alternative art scenes (including shows at the Leo Castelli Gallery, Howard Wise Gallery and Bianchini Gallery) and established Apple, a not-for-profit space (1969 -1973). His subsequent text-based, works drew attention to art system relations between artist, dealer, and collector. He became a registered trademark in 2007, formalizing his art-brand status, which he has continued to explore through transaction-based works. He has had survey exhibitions at: The Mayor Gallery, London in 2010 (British and American Works 1960-69); Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam in 2009 (A History of the Brand and Revealed /Concealed curated by Nicholaus Schafhausen; and the Serpentine Gallery, London in 1974 (From Barrie Bates to Billy Apple 1961-1974). The artist lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand.

For further information on this exhibition and images please contact the gallery.

Jim Speers Long Days

Fei Contemporary Art Centre (FCAC), Shanghai to 10 November 2012

Jim Speers' exhibition Long Days is showing at Fei Contemporary Art Centre (FCAC), Shanghai to 10 November 2012. Timed to coincide with the 9th Shanghai Biennale, Long Days featuresrecent video work by Speers including Night Barges, a new work filmed in Shanghai earlier this year. Speers looks at the Huangpu River and its surrounds, documenting the way they are being transformed by economic activity on the river and social forces at work in the urban landscape.

Speers says: "To observe things is to recognise the passing of time. I use video to explore economic activities in urban landscapes, attending to the particularity of things. I film landscapes being altered by social developments, making the viewer an observer of commonplace scenes passing into history. The sequences I create are ordinary today but will need explanation in the future. The videos present a mixture of objects, stories and historical facts. Everything is connected: flags and taxi trips are interwoven with people's memories and plants growing."

Long Days also includes videos exploring economic activities in urban landscapes in Minsk, Belarus (News from Nowhere,2012); Yugoslavia (Hotel Jugoslavia, 2012, made in collaboration with Mladen Bizumic); Detroit, USA (Ghosts of Detroit, 2012); and Tallin, Estonia (Raine Karp's Linnehall, 2012).

Fei Contemporary Art Centre is a not-for-profit space run by artist/curator Li Xiaofei, one of the founders of the Zendai contemporary art museum.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows by represented and invited artists, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

Ross Manning: Field Emmissions

26 November - 22 December 2012

Starkwhite is pleased to present Field Emissions by Brisbane-based artist Ross Manning, from 26 November to 22 December 2012. The artist will launch the exhibition with a sonic performance on Sunday 25 November (time to be announced).

Update: the exhibition will be extended to run for an extra week from 15 - 22 January 2013

In Field Emissions, Manning utilises lo-fi domestic technologies to stage an installation of performative, kinetic light sculptures. Suspended from the ceiling, rotating structures of coloured fluorescent tubes driven by household rotary cooling fans project washes of colour throughout the gallery. As the tubes move in relationship to each other, the viewer experiences the physicality of coloured light beams mixing to form different colours that inhabit and engage the gallery space. In an adjacent room he projects white light through dichroic filters and cut glass, animating the space with dancing beams of light refracted into the colours of the rainbow.

The exhibition is a continuation of an ongoing project exploring the aesthetic potential of the additive colour model, specifically the RGB (red, green, blue) model, which is at the centre of digital image reproduction and employed in all camera, screen and projection based technologies as well as film-based colour photography. But Manning's assemblages of everyday objects also direct us to the relationship between technology and contemporary life, which is increasingly lived in virtual space.

"Manning's work threatens to lift the veil from the fetishised consumer electronics on which we are dependent, subtly repositioning the technologies that operate as the unseen 'given' in our daily lives," says Brisbane-based writer Danni Zuvela. "In place of the corporate software-hardware standards that now so normative so as to be effectively coercive, we are presented with a quiet unworking - an alternative emotion of objects. What is highlighted throughput Manning's work is the ongoing, unresolved question about the dynamics of power between technology and contemporary life."

Ross Manning lives and works in Brisbane where he also performs with Sky Needle, a conceptual rock band performing primitive hypnotic music played on built instruments. Recent exhibitions and performances include: Volume One: MCA Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2012); NEW12, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2012);Tarrawarra Biennial 2012: Sonic Spheres, Melbourne; Spectra (solo), Milani Gallery, Brisbane (2012); The Melbourne Jazz Festival (2011); New Psychedelia, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane (2011); 3 songs (solo) Long Gallery, for MONA FONA, Tasmania (2010); Double Refraction, Lismore Regional Gallery, NSW (2010); Come Hither Noise, Freemantle Arts Centre (2009); Primavera09, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2009); Sunshine and Zincaloom (solo), Ptarmigan Space, Finland (2009); The New Truth to Materials, Boxcopy Gallery, Brisbane (2009); Batteries Not Included, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney (2008); and The New Fresh Cut, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2008). He won Australia's Churchie National Emerging Art Prize in 2011, judged by MONA curator Nicole Durling, and he was a finalist in the 2012 National New Media Award and exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

Peter Peryer Edition

Peter Peryer and Starkwhite are delighted to announce the release of Bluebells, a new 12 x 16cm photograph produced as an edition of 50 and priced at $350, unframed and including GST.

Bluebells is a continuation of an occasional series of photographs produced by the artist at this time of the year, including Rocket, Port Taranaki, Waitangi and Freesia.

For further information, including prices for framed works, please contact:

Jae Hoon Lee Antarctic Fever

18 September to 13 October 2012

Starkwhite is pleased to present Antarctic Fever by Korean-born, New Zealand-based artist Jae Hoon Lee from 18 September to 13 October 2012.

The works in Antarctic Fever add to the body of work created by Jae Hoon Lee over the past decade that engage the natural sublime and the technological sublime; that conflate high-tech artifice and monstrous bodily organicism; and that fuse vernacular experience with a sense of the religious or spiritual. They stem from a nomdic practice that takes him through different countries and cultures to create photographs and videos that move beyond the observations of an art tourist. They are filtered through an Eastern philospohical perspective and his experience of contemporary Korean culture, which results in a richly layered view of the world

At first glance Jae Hoon Lee's images appear real. Their high level of detail makes us think that what we are looking at is true. It's not until we look closer that we notice their subtle tricks. Constructed from sometimes hundreds of images taken over periods of time, his source material is stitched together in Photoshop. By combining documentary photography and the fictional possibilities offered by new technologies Jae Hoon Lee sets up a compelling interplay of real and virtual experiences.

As Aaron Seeto observes in his essay Intimate Camera, "The digital space that Jae Hoon Lee's work occupies complicates the types of discrete cultural narrative which a lot of commentary on contemporary Asian art in places like Australia and New Zealand attempts to construct. The Asian-Australian, the Asian-American, the Korean-New Zealander: these monikers stand in as signifiers for a political discussion that only partially captures the reality of a cultural experience. In the case of Jae Hoon Lee, this digital space affords other types of networks to emerge, an accretion and also filtration of influences, as it progresses along its network, refining, shifting, changing how, or what it is an artist's practice ultimately means."

Jae Hoon Lee was born in Korea and after completing high school he went to San Francisco to attend art school. A few years later he arrived in New Zealand to undertake post-graduate studies and this year completed his Doc FA at Auckland University's Elam School of Fine Arts. He has been represented in solo and thematic group exhibitions in New Zealand and overseas, including: Unguided Tours: The 2011 Anne Landa Award for New Media and Video, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2011); NOMAD, 4A, Sydney (2010); Ground Zero, Starkwhite, Auckland (2010); Daniel Crooks and Jae Hoon Lee, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2008); Jae Hoon Lee Project, Te Tuhi Centre for Contemporary Art, Pakaranga, New Zealand (2008); Asia Pacific Documentary & Video, Performance Space, Sydney, Australia (2006); Open Late, IMA, Brisbane, Australia (2006); Square2, City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand (2005); Hotbed, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand (2005); Asian Traffic Beijing, Today Art Museum, Beijing, China (2005); Break Shift, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2004); Greenhouse, Frankfurter Welle, Germany (2004); Asian Traffic Shanghai, Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, China (2004); Pressing Flesh, the New Gallery (Auckland Art Gallery) New Zealand (2003); Alive! Still Images into the Twenty-First Century, Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand (2001); and Flesh and Fruity, Artspace, Auckland, New Zealand (2001).

The artist wishes to acknowledge the support of Antarctica New Zealand with the exhibition. Each year Antarctica New Zealand invites artists to become honorary Arts Fellows and travel to the frozen continent to undertake specific projects. Jae Hoon Lee visited Antarctica as an Arts Fellow in January 2012.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows by represented and invited artists, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

Greetings from Los Angeles curated by Brian Butler

Starkwhite is pleased to present Greetings from Los Angeles, an exhibition curated by Brian Butler.

Like a postcard which arrives in the letterbox, Greetings from Los Angeles is from a place, but it does not mean the sender or thoughts are solely from that place. The contemporary art world is spoken of as a transnational and trans-cultural space, populated by nomadic figures whose influences and sphere of influence becomes enmeshed. Grounded in a relationship built when the Californian curator was director of Auckland's Artspace gallery, the exhibition presents a slice of current practice from Butler's home Los Angeles back to Auckland at the invitation of Starkwhite.

Los Angeles' transformation into a world-class contemporary art city is several decades in the making. It grew organically, and in varied directions, out of a process of experimentation and the cross-pollination of different artistic practices, traditions and cultural movements. Distinguished by its patchwork of ethnic communities and Pacific location yet trans-Atlantic focus, LA is both a broker of, and catalyst for, impulses in contemporary art practice. Los Angeles is a city where everything intersects.

A slice of that dynamically cross-pollinated art scene, Greetings from Los Angeles presents the work of eight internationally practicing artists. While it is easy to conclude that having an international profile is all about exporting New Zealand work overseas, a reciprocal programme bringing influential current practice to our shores is no less vital. It is not only the ability to see a slice of the international scene and the work of significant contemporary artists which are key to feeding local practice, but also the instigating of new alliances and global networks.

Increasingly positioned and finding a new identity at the intersection of Asia-Pacific routes and artists, Starkwhite in particular, and New Zealand in general, is redefining its focus and nurturing trans-Pacific trajectories. Los Angeles is at the periphery of this network, the Eastern Pacific-Rim powerhouse of contemporary culture.

All of the artists in this exhibition have exhibited previously in New Zealand and many of them are currently in exhibitions around the world.

Diana Thater can be seen in Riotous Baroque at the Kunsthaus Zürich and was the subject of the recent one-person exhibitionChernobyl at the IMA, Brisbane. Fiona Banner's Art Angel project A Room for London continues until the end of 2012 while her Tate Britain commission was voted the most important exhibition of 2011. Jessica Stockholder's 2010 Reina Sofia exhibition in Madrid transformed the Palacio de Cristal del Parque del Retiro. Stockholder has just completed the largest public artwork in Chicago. Color Jam has taken over a major intersection until the end of September. Kerry Tribe's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Power Plant, Toronto, Modern Art, Oxford, the Camden Arts Centre, London and Arnolfini, Bristol. Her work was first seen in Laura Preston's exhibition moment making at ARTSPACE in 2006 and was recently at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in TRUE STORIES: SCRIPTED REALITIES. Rirkrit Tiravanija currently has a major work SOUP/NO SOUPat the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Ann Veronica Janssens is currently in the 18th Biennale of Sydney. In 2011, Uta Barth completed a new commission for The Chicago Art Institute, which has lead to two new bodies of work and a recently released book. Jorge Méndez Blake currently has a seminal work at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris/ ARC in Resisting the Present and was included in the 2011 exhibition 21st Century at GOMA, Brisbane with Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows by represented and invited artists, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices.

Seung Yul Oh HUGGONG

"Seung Yul Oh transforms childhood memories into surreal, large-scale installations. His whimsical works experiment with colour, materials and movement as he reanimates games and toys by exaggerating their familiar scale."4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney

In Huggong, Seung Yul Oh presents two oversize inflatable sculptures squeezed into Starkwhite's downstairs gallery. Compressed between floor and ceiling, the balloon-shaped sculptures press up against walls, bulge around columns and crowd into a corner space under a staircase. Composed in vibrant orange and yellow, the glossy surface of the works reflect pastel washes of colour into nooks and crannies created by the swelling forms.

Huggong follows a recent performance at the Auckland Art Gallery in Made Active: The Chartwell Exhibition where visitors were invited to take up positions throughout the gallery and blow up balloons until they exploded. Footage from the performance has been incorporated into his ongoing video work The ability to blow themselves up, which will be screened at Starkwhite for the duration of the exhibition.

Born in Seoul, Korea in 1981, Seung Yul Oh moved to New Zealand 15 years ago and completed an MFA at Auckland University's Elam School of Fine Arts. He now divides his time between Auckland and Seoul.

Oh won the Goldwater Art Award in 2003 and the Waikato National Art Award in 2005. Last year he was invited by Choi Jeong Hwa to take up a residency at the artist-run space ggool in Seoul and he was the recipient of the 2011 Harriet Friedlander New York Residency Award administered by the Arts Foundation of New Zealand.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

Jim Speers New Windsor Road

20 August – 10 September 2011

Starkwhite is pleased to present New Windsor Rd by Jim Speers from 20 August to 10 September 2011.

New Winsor Rd was filmed last summer in the western suburbs of Auckland while Speers was the artist in residence at the McCahon House in Titirangi. In a series of long takes, the film explores the midday solitude of a slice of outlying suburbia - empty streets, sections awaiting buildings, where the other side of the road meets open fields - taking us from here to there while everyone else is elsewhere. With its focus on the everyday, New Windsor Rd is a meditation on what happens when nothing happens.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland’s Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists’ projects, solo shows, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices. Starkwhite also represents artists from New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific rim.

Trenton Garratt: Absorption and Reflection/專注

15 June to 13 July 2011

Starkwhite is pleased to present Absorption and Reflection/專注 、沉思 by Trenton Garratt from 15 June to 13 July 2011

Since 2009 Garratt has been developing an ongoing series of paintings with a sunrise over landscape as a dominant theme. He says: "I'm interested point-and-shoot digital photography as a social activity and its influence on representing landscape. The spectacle of a sunrise, or light dappled landscapes preserved in binary code and presented red green and blue pixels is the source of the imagery for my paintings - the kind of image that functions as a shared experience found in personal photo albums shared on Facebook, Flickr and Google or beautiful background images for your desktop computer and mobile phone's home screen. Despite the clichéd schmaltz, this kind of imagery is deeply inter-subjective and has a self-sustaining bond with sincereness."

In this exhibition Garratt continues the theme of nature and light. Absorption and Reflection/專注 、沉思 is based on paintings of idyllic, light dappled seascapes and sees the artist contemplating the seaside as a location for sanctuary and sojourn.

Trenton Garratt graduated MFA (2008) University of Auckland and was the recipient of the Henrietta and Lola an Tunbridge Scholarship. Recent group exhibitions include: The Obstinate Object, City Gallery Wellington (2012) curated by Aaron Lister and Abby Cunane; Running on Pebbles at the Snake Pit, Auckland (2012), curated by Allan Smith; I could of sworn I, Daire Sanat Istanbul (2010) and Grimm Museum, Berlin (2011); and Knowing You, Knowing Me, Artspace, Auckland (2010), curated by Emma Bugden.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows by represented and invited artists, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

Gavin Hipkins Second Pavilion

Starkwhite is pleased to announce the launch of a solo exhibition by Auckland based photographer and filmmaker Gavin Hipkins. Second Pavilion is a photographic installation that brings together a set of 40 colour photographs, The Pavilion, with his ongoing Monuments series.

Building on earlier major constructed photographic series including The Blue Light (1997) and The Colony (2002), Second Pavilion juxtaposes different photographic genres including makeshift studio models with picturesque clouds and monochromes.Second Pavilion continues Hipkins' broader project of mapping modernity by sampling modernist aesthetics and motifs - from European fascism to pictorialist photography - while reconfiguring these idioms in extended and fractured narrative structures. InSecond Pavilion this exploration plays with the legacies of national displays including the modern Olympics and international expositions. While Hipkins references historical documentation of events in his projects such as Leni Riefenstahl's 1938Olympia, a reworking of his own archival images alludes to more personal travel photography alongside cultural tourisms.

He represented New Zealand at the 25th Sao Paulo Biennale, Brazil in 2002, and the 11th Biennale of Sydney in 1998. He has completed artist residencies at Artspace, Sydney in 1998; the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 1999; Waikato Museum of Art and History in 2000; the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York City in 2006; and the McCahon House, French Bay, Auckland in 2008.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows by represented and invited artists, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

Karl Fritsch and Gavin Hipkins Der Tiefenglanz II

Starkwhite is pleased to announce the launch of a collaborative exhibition by internationally celebrated jeweller Karl Fritsch and Auckland-based photographer and filmmaker Gavin Hipkins. Der Tiefenglanz II is Fritsch and Hipkins' second collaborative project.

The German word Tiefenglanz translates roughly as 'deep gloss' and it is precisely this exploration of surface qualities and illusions of depth that compels Fritsch and Hipkins' ongoing collaborative project. Using black and white analogue printing techniques including solarisation, Hipkins hand prints images from his negative archive amassed from two decades of photographing in local and exotic settings. These prints are then forwarded to Kritsch for embellishment, scarring and rupture: rubies are forged through the photograph of a head of a modernist sculpture; silver plates conceal a Nazi eagle monument; synthetic jewels sit alongside an iconic poster of a hash smoking hippy babe. This process of one artist forwarding 'incomplete pictures' to another artist, calls on the playfulness, trust and chance elements associated with the surrealist exquisite corpse (cadavre exquis) game, yet with Fritsch and Hipkins' working process the game extends beyond drawing to material assemblage.

Karl Fritsch lives and works in Wellington. Recent group shows include: The Turnov Collection, National Museum of Archaeology in Lisbon; Yellow Metals, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Collectat the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. His work has been acquired by leading international museums and public collections, including: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Pinakothek of Modern Art, Munich; Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum Turnov/Czech Republic; Museum of Decorative Arts, Montréal/Canada; Royal College of Art, London; Auckland Museum, Auckland; and The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington.

Gavin Hipkins is an Auckland-based artist. His photography and films have been exhibited extensively at national and international levels including: Armory Film, New York, 2012; Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2011; MAK, Vienna, 2011; New Zealand International Film Festival (2011); National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; The Queensland Art Gallery, 2010; The San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts, California, 2007; International Museum of Photography and Film, George Eastman House, Rochester, NY, 2006; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2004; CCA Wattis Institute, Oakland, 2002; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2000; Palazzo Re Rebaudengo, Guarene d' Alba, Italy, 2000. He represented New Zealand at the 25th Sao Paulo Biennale, Brazil in 2002, and the 11th Biennale of Sydney in 1998. He has completed artist residencies at Artspace, Sydney in 1998; the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 1999; Waikato Museum of Art and History in 2000; the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York City in 2006; and the McCahon House, French Bay, Auckland in 2008.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows by represented and invited artists, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

Layla Rudneva-Mackay Pointing at Trees

At first, Lucie merely thanked me shyly for my letters; soon she found a way to repay me: since she did not write, she chose to give me flowers. It all began like this: we were strolling through a wooded area when Lucie suddenly bent down, picked a flower, and handed it to me. I was touched; it didn't surprise me in the least. But when she stood waiting with a whole bunch of them the next time we met, I began to feel a little embarrassed.

I was twenty-two and painstakingly careful to avoid anything liable to cast doubts on my virility or maturity; I was ashamed of having to walk along the street carrying flowers; I did not like buying them, still less receiving them. In my embarrassment I pointed out to Lucie that it was men who gave flowers to women, not women to men, but when I saw the tears well up in her eyes, I hastened to add how beautiful they were, and accepted them.

There was nothing to be done. From then on, there were flowers waiting for me every time we met, and in the end I gave in, because I was disarmed by the spontaneity of giving and understood that Lucie cared for it; perhaps her tongue-tied state, her lack of verbal eloquence, made her think of flowers as a form of speech; not in the sense of heavy-handed conventional flower symbolism, but in a sense still more archaic, more nebulous, more instinctive, pre-linguistic; perhaps, having always been sparing of words, she longed for that mute stage of evolution when there were no words and people communicated by simple gestures, pointing at trees, laughing, touching one another....

Whether or not I grasped the essence of Lucie's flower-giving, I was finally moved by it...

Milan Kundera, The Joke, p.78-9

Layla Rudneva-Mackay's latest exhibition is comprised of paintings of flowers. Although a significant deviation from the photographic works she has become known for; her distinctive approach to subject matter, treatment and medium are still evident here and in this light the new works are less of a deviation than they may first appear.

As a photographer, Rudneva-Mackay's practice often involved studies of arranged subjects - people, objects and settings - revealing an interest in form and patches or fields of colour in a way that was clear but not explicit. Instead, the images' relation to language is detached, as if the visuality of the works is underlined by a certain silence or a poetic turn in title.

The paintings currently on show are reminiscent of Post-Impressionist works and recall their observation of what has been traditionally considered less lofty artistic genres. Created at a time when painting was processing the advent of photography as a documentary commonplace it was clear, next to the new medium's formalism and austerity, that paintings of flowers could be more interesting than the Academies might have first thought.

A vase of flowers might also be a cone and circles. And what is it to show someone something rather than telling them? The act of observation and its material expression demands a radical slowness and humility of gesture - painted or otherwise - and the steady, abstracting attention of the eye…all things that define Rudneva-Mackay's practice.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows by represented and invited artists, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

Billy Apple PORT/STARBOARD

Starkwhite is presenting a suite of projects by Billy Apple from 19 April to 24 May 2012, beginning with The Immortalisation of Billy Apple® (Stage 2), a project by Billy Apple and Craig Hilton. After a one-week showing, the exhibition has been relocated to a smaller space in the gallery, making way for Port / Starboard, a new project by Billy Apple and Inhouse. Each project in the series runs to 24 May.

Billy Apple introduced red and green as his corporate colours in London when he established his art brand back in 1962. He changed his name and had two photographs taken of himself, front-and-back-of-head shots with red and green backgrounds respectively. This manouvre was a self-branding exercise and the brand was on its way. Fifty years later, Billy Apple® has become a registered trademark with the ability to apply his art brand to other things - 'A brand looking for a product' - produced under his art umbrella.

Apple uses visual aspects of his brand identity - colour, font, logo and so forth to generate artworks. He has extended the symbolic usage of red and greens to his art and in this exhibition he presents a suite of works that capitalise on the port/starboard meaning.

Based in Auckland, New Zealand, since the 1990s, Apple exhibits regularly in dealer, public and artist-run galleries, and his works have been included in major international and national touring exhibitions. These include: Toi Toi Toi: Three Generations of New Zealand Artists (Kassel & Auckland, 1999); Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin (New York, 1999); Kronos + Kairos: Über die Zeit in der Zeitgenössischen Kunst, (Kassel, 1999); Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture (Frankfurt & Liverpool, 2002-3); American Supermarket (Pittsburgh, 2002); Art of the '60s from Tate Britain (Auckland 2006); Remix (Virginia, 2011) and the upcoming Gold (Vienna, 2012). In 2009, a second major survey exhibition of Apple's work was staged in two parts at Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam (Billy Apple®: A History of the Brand and Revealed/Concealed). In New Zealand aspects of his career have been reevaluated in exhibitions such as Billy Apple: New York 1969-1973 (Wellington 2009).

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows by represented and invited artists, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

THE IMMORTALISATION OF BILLY APPLE STAGE 2

19 April - 25 April 2012

Starkwhite is pleased to launch The Immortalisation of Billy Apple® (Stage 2) on Thursday 19 April with an installation that will run to 25 April 2012.

The Immortalisation of Billy Apple® is a collaborative project by Billy Apple and Craig Hilton where art is in the service of science - Apple's cell line is being used in studies that will directly benefit cancer and immunology research - and science serves the artist to enhance and protect the artist's brand by immortalising his biological tissue in perpetuity. This transaction theoretically ensures that the brand (and the artist) can last forever, unconstrained by death.

I consent to the wide distribution of cell lines derived from my blood, including deposit with the American Type Culture Collection cell bank. I understand that this may enable unrestricted use of my cells outside my control, including the potential analysis of my DNA.-Billy Apple 12/05/2009

In the project, Craig Hilton and Billy Apple have provided the setting for science to blend with art. During the 2009 'immortalisation' process, Billy Apple B-lymphocytes were isolated and grown in tissue culture media. These cells were then virally transformed and can now grow indefinitely in cell culture medium. Without such a transformation, the cells would have had, like the artist they are derived from, a limited lifespan. The newly immortalised cells are housed in a container that mimics the precise environmental conditions - temperature, humidity, nutrition and contamination-free conditions - present in the artist's body.

The Billy Apple® cell line was presented publicly as an art project in The Immortalisation of Billy Apple® at Starkwhite from 6-10 May 2010. The launch celebrated a world first because for the first time human tissue has been made available for the purposes of both art and scientific research.

On April 12, 2012 University of Auckland's School of Biological Sciences sent this living artwork to the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) to be added to its collection. Headquartered in Manassas, Virginia, the ATCC is the world's premier biological culture repository. It was established to carry out research to improve the propagation, preservation, classification, and characterization of cultures and to develop new and enhanced culture products.

The Billy Apple® cells are the first artwork to be collected by the ATCC, creating further dialogue and interdisciplinary opportunity, which highlights the ongoing nature of this project and immortality of these cells. As the cells usefulness (as an art or science resource) increases, so does the significance of this artist's biological tissue. Replication of the artwork/genetic material will now be exponentially reproduced globally.

The Immortalisation of Billy Apple® (Stage 2) at Starkwhite is timed to coincide with the transfer of 60 million Billy Apple® cells to the American Type Culture Collection.

Billy Apple®'s career spans three continents and six decades. He has been at the forefront of the evolution of pop and conceptual art, and continues to test arts perimeters. His diverse practice has covered many fields but it is his exploration of new technologies and media that has led Apple to work collaboratively with scientists and medical professionals since the sixties. Current projects include finding the center of the continent of Zealandia and exploration of the lost eighth wonder of the world, the Pink and White Terraces in Lake Rotomahana in collaboration with marine geologist, Dr Cornel de Ronde. Billy Apple is represented by Starkwhite, Auckland; Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington and The Mayor Gallery, London.

Craig Hilton is a New Zealand scientist, artist and educator. After completion of a PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Otago, New Zealand, he took a position at Harvard Medical School and later at the University of Massachusetts as an oncologist and immunologist. He returned to New Zealand in 2003 and completed an MFA at the University of Auckland, Elam School of Fine Arts. He is interested in: the interaction of science and art, particularly art/science collaborations i.e. those with genuine art and science value/outputs; how art might be able to contribute to dialogue regarding science, molecular biology, biological discovery, biotechnology etc; and the cultural implications of the these revolutionising technologies

This project is entirely dependent on the goodwill and understanding of Professor Rod Dunbar, School of Biological Sciences, University of Auckland. The project collaborators also wish to acknowledge the support of: Daniel Verdon, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Unitec New Zealand and The American Type Culture Collection.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows by represented and invited artists, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

Walters prize

4 August to 11 November 2012

Performances of Alicia Frankovich's Floor Resistance will be staged within the artist's space in the Walters Prize exhibition, which runs at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki from 4 August to 11 November 2012. The next performance take place on Friday 19 October at 3pm.

Floor Resistance is a series of choreographed movements and physical spatial relations, some rehearsed and some unrehearsed with unknown outcomes. Spaces and conventions are subverted and slightly altered so we in turn consider our positions and behaviours. This work merges classical music and forces of movement in a live contemporary art experience.

Alicia Frankovich is one of four artists nominated for the 2012 Walters Prize, which is awarded for an outstanding work of contemporary New Zealand art produced and exhibited during the past two years.

In a statement on her work, the jury said: "Alicia Frankovich has developed a number of exceptional bodies of work both in New Zealand and overseas. The panel was especially compelled by her performance work Floor Resistance, which took place at the Hebbel Am Ufer in Berlin in 2011. This work re-negotiates the audience/ performer relationship employing an orchestra in an unconventional configuration to unfold highly original ideas pertaining to the staging of live art. By altering the positioning and placement of the orchestra in the space, Frankovich asks us to rethink and experience anew the relationship between audience member and participant."

Each of the four artists shortlisted for the 2012 Walters Prize receives $5000 and the opportunity to present their selected project in the Walters Prize exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, which runs for three months from 4 August. An international judge will be will be named later this year to select the winner who will receive $50,000 and an all-expenses-paid trip to New York, including the opportunity to exhibit at Saatchi & Saatchi's world headquarters.

Born in Tauranga 1980, Alicia Frankovich currently lives and works in Berlin. Her recent exhibition and performance highlights include: (2011): Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, (solo), Dublin Contemporary, City Within the City, Artsonje Center, Seoul, Burn what you cannot steal, Galerja Nova, Zagreb, Floor Resistance, Hebbel Am Ufer, HAU 3, Berlin; Undisciplined Bodies; an Evening Dissolving Social and Spatial Conventions, Salon Populaire, Berlin; (2010): Effigies, Dunedin Public Art Gallery,NEW010, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, The 4th Auckland Triennale, Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon, Auckland City Art Gallery; (2009): A Plane for Behavers, ARTSPACE, Auckland (solo), Picturing the Studio, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; (2008): International Prize for Performance, Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea Trento. Frankovich has recently published her first monographic catalogue: Film/Body/Gesture/ Alicia Frankovich: Book of Works, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2011. Frankovich has just completed a three-month residency at AIR Antwerp.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows by represented and invited artists, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays inot new music and other interdisciplinary practices.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

Starkwhite group show

Starkwhite is pleased to present a group show of new work by represented artists working in a variety of media and employing a range of presentation formats. They include a 2.2 x 2.2m drawing by John Reynolds executed in silver marker on a gallery window; a diptych from Billy Apple's FROM THE COLLECTION series (one panel in Chinese and other in English) providing an example of how collectors can commission a personalised, text-based portrait and frontspiece for their collection; a floor-based video installation by Clinton Watkins; and paintings by Martin Basher from a new series developed for his recent solo exhibition at The Armory Show, New York.

BILLY APPLE® IS 50

On THURSDAY 22 NOVEMBER 1962, Billy Apple came into being. It is exactly 50 years since that art historic moment.

In London in 1962, I began an extended work which was part of an effort to break down the separation between "art activity" and "life activity". I decided to use my own identity as the vehicle with which to explore the concept of the artist as "art object" .

 Billy Apple, 1974

As one of the 'Young Contemporaries' in London, Billy Apple was at the vanguard of British Pop. In 1964, he moved to New York, where he continued to produce pop-related works then developed a conceptual and process-oriented practice. He exhibited regularly in New York's museums, dealer galleries (Leo Castelli Gallery, 1977-1984), and alternative art scenes, establishing APPLE, a not-for-profit space (1969 -1973) at 161 West 23rd Street. The Serpentine Gallery, London hosted a major survey in 1974,From Barrie Bates to Billy Apple 1960-1974. In the 80s, his text-based Transaction works drew attention to art system relations between artist, dealer, and collector. He went on to become a registered trademark in 2007, formalizing his art-brand status. This was the culmination of the pop conceptual project begun in London, and he is producing works that investigate intellectual property issues with the support of the Minter Ellison Rudd Watts' IP team.

Apple is also working on collaborative art/science projects, such as finding the centre of the continent of Zealandia and investigating the location of the remnants of the Pink Terraces in Lake Rotomahana with Dr Cornel de Ronde of GNS Sciences.The Immortalisation of Billy Apple®, 2009, is a collaboration spear-headed by Dr Craig Hilton and The School of Biological Sciences at the University of Auckland, in which cells from Apple's blood have been virally transformed to create a cell line that will live outside the body. The Billy Apple® Cell Linewas moved in 2012 to the American Type Culture Collection, the world's premier biological culture repository.

Apple exhibits both locally and internationally and has recently had survey exhibitions at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, 2009 and The Mayor Gallery, London, 2010. In 2012 he has had work in Pop Art in Western Europe, Museum het Valkhof, Nijmegen; Gold, Belvedere Palace Museum, Vienna; Howard Wise Gallery: Exploring the New, Moeller Fine Art, Berlin and Hamish Morrison Gallerie, Berlin. His works have also been exhibited at the Art Basel; TEFAF, Maastricht; PAD, London and ExpoChicago Art Fairs this year.

Billy Apple's work is held across the USA in public collections such as the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit; The Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; Pasadena Museum of Modern Art, Pasadena; Boise Art Museum, Idaho; and the Corning Museum of Glass, New York. His work is represented in major New Zealand art institutions, such as Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand, Wellington; Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki, Auckland; and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth; in corporate collections such as the Bank of New Zealand, Fay Richwhite, Fletcher Challenge, Price Waterhouse Coopers and Minter Ellison Rudd Watts; and in public collections such as Victoria University of Wellington and the Auckland City Council. It is also collected by prominent art patrons such as Leonard Lauder, New York; E J Power, London; and, within New Zealand, Jenny Gibbs, Kevin Roberts and the Chartwell Collection.

Jim Speers Crystal Paradise

21 November – 24 December 2009

Starkwhite is pleased to present Crystal Spirit by Jim Speers from 21 November to 24 December 2009.

With his first exhibition at Starkwhite Speers has transformed the downstairs gallery, laying white vinyl over the polished concrete floor, concealing staff behind a closed door and removing all visible traces of its history as an exhibition space. With the addition of a decorative, logo-inspired strip on the floor and an array of poster-like images on the walls evoking old campaigns, the installation takes on the appearance of an abandoned enterprise, courting associations that you can’t quite put your finger - or as Speers would have it, staging a half-memorised history for viewers to decode and customize.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland’s Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists’ projects, solo shows, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices. Starkwhite also represents artists from New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific rim.

Martin Basher Free Spirit No Interest

10 March to 4 April 2009

Starkwhite is pleased to present Free Spirit No Interest, a solo show by New York-based artist Martin Basher, from 10 March to 4 April 2009.

" Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina; old furniture, grandparents pots and pans / the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum."- Susan Sontag.

Located at the intersection of rampant big-box consumerism on one axis, and an age old search for personal meaning and belief on another, the work of Martin Basher examines ways in which images and objects connoting hope, utopic desire, freedom, and the ache to believe are articulated, co-opted and consumed in our commodity-saturated capitalist culture.

Weighing corporate profit and mass production against what might be best described as a peculiarly modern desire to find enduring personal profundity through objects, Basher's work is an inconclusive chronicle of hopes and disappointments of life in late-capitalism; namely the affection, disaffection and miasma of life when the dollar is the bottom line and desire and meaning are deftly manipulated and manufactured for commercial gain.

Free Spirit / No Interest, features a suite of new paintings, drawings and sculptures constructed primarily from material found in clearance warehouses, junkyards, head shops and dollar stores. Plastic, artificial and cheap, Basher cobbles together this material in a kind of sculptural collage that plays with these paradoxes of mass-consumed culture, exposing longings, desires and loathings normally cloaked in the banality of familiar. The lottery tickets, sex toys, booze, crystals, incense, nudist magazines, junk food and vitamins etc are emblematic of utopic, sublime, ineffable experience, yet they are anchored by commerce, and informed by a visual vernacular/culture where commerce, spirituality and religiosity are deeply and inexorably entwined, symbiotic even. Basher dissects and recontextualizes these relationships, and in doing so upsets the normal order, playing them off against each other. As neither quite believer or disbeliever, Basher takes a critical look at the complex plays of consumed desire, while as a participant, he is as invested and as implicated as anyone else.

Basher is among a rising generation of young artists working internationally who are grappling to deal with the contradictory dynamics of power, desire and identity within a consumer-capitalist world. Bracketed by the utopic rhetoric of modernism one hand and an amnesiac depoliticized post-modern swamp of MTV, reality television and dollar-store merchandise on the other, the works in this show see genuine experiences of happiness and satisfaction in contradictory, overlapping relationships with artificial structures of happiness and satisfaction. As a deeply ambivalent observer, Basher's work exposes these tensions, and at the same time remains complicit, a shrine and a funerary pyre to capitalism in equal measure.

The artist wishes to acknowledge the generous support of Creative New Zealand toward the production of this exhibition.

Martin Basher holds a MFA from the prestigious Fine Art Division of Columbia University in New York City, where he has been based for a decade. He was recently the inaugural recipient of the Susan Goodman Residency and Fellowship in Berlin, Germany, and will take up a residency at the Artists Alliance in Downtown New York in the second half of 2009. He has exhibited internationally and nationally.

ALICIA FRANKOVICH: BODIES AND SITUATIONS

Starkwhite is delighted to announce a solo exhibition by Alicia Frankovich, Bodies and Situations opening February 10 from 6.30pm - 9pm.

Frankovich works with notions of performance, using video, sculpture and photographs as well as the live body. Bodies and Situations analyses equivalences between different modes of language. Forms and movements in her works pertain to movements and materials of the body and elicit a sense of social and urban critique. Frankovich also cites pop-cultural references like games and films, as well art works from the twentieth century but diverts these moments into a new spatial and social discourse.

Frankovich presents a suite of new and recent sculptures, photographs and short films including: Man walked on the moon,Volution , Genet Piece, Egg happening Stuttgart and Jumping guy (live). Frankovich will show her first 35 mm piece Volution , following strong reception at Dublin Contemporary 2011 where it was reviewed in frieze as one of 'several strong works'. In this short film Frankovich set up a boxing scene that morphs into a dance at Berlin's Kottbusser Tor. Loosely citing a boxing scene from Charlie Chaplin's 'City Lights', the roles of the boxers and referee become confused. She both constructs and participates in a scenario that is simultaneously spontaneous and controlled. A group of dilettante and trained figures including a 'Street University' kid, a dancer, impulsively-invited friends and the artist herself, all swing and turn in multiple rotations.

Frankovich puts bodies into situations where they play out relations testing social conventions and behaviours. In her recent works, she has taken fragments from autobiographical life encounters or as moments pulled from art history, constructing new choreographies and situations - presenting them in the forms of recorded situations and direct encounters with kinetic sculptures and also with real people.

Recently described by Dominic Eichler in Frankovich's publication Film/Body/Gesture Alicia Frankovich: Book of Works:

In various ways Frankovich's compositions mount symbolic attacks on things like the conventionally static frames offered by cultural spaces, and the expectation of contemplative calm when viewing material misused into sculpture. Duration, suspension, push and pull, the exertion of the artist or her performers' skill-sets and muscles, motors, ropes and apparatuses are all deployed. Typically, physical action is presented as a kind of rupture, resistance or struggle, as something risky, half- remembered or alien, intentionally unmastered or fleeting. Every movement we make, even mindlessly, relies on our own body memories. Performing an action, or isolating and consciously repeating a movement, however slight, allows for an examination and raises the question of subscribing meaning which brings to the fore the interaction of the embodied subject and cultural interpretation. Repetitive movement is both machine-like and the all-too-human basis of most learning and labour.

Born in Tauranga 1980, Alicia Frankovich currently lives and works in Berlin. Her recent exhibition and performance highlights include: (2011): Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, (solo), Dublin Contemporary, City Within the City, Artsonje Center, Seoul, Burn what you cannot steal, Galerja Nova, Zagreb, Floor Resistance, Hebbel Am Ufer, HAU 3, Berlin (2011); Undisciplined Bodies; an Evening Dissolving Social and Spatial Conventions, Salon Populaire, Berlin; (2010): Effigies , Dunedin Public Art Gallery,NEW010 , Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne,The 4th Auckland Triennale, Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon, Auckland City Art Gallery; (2009): A Plane for Behavers, ARTSPACE, Auckland (solo), Picturing the Studio, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; (2008): International Prize for Performance, Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea Trento. Frankovich has recently published her first monographic catalogue: Film/Body/Gesture/ Alicia Frankovich: Book of Works, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2011. In 2012 Frankovich will take up a three-month residency at AIR Antwerp.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, exhibitions by represented and invited artists, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices.

For further information on this exhibition and images please contact.

MARIANA VASSILEVA: THE GENTLE BRUTALITY OF SIMULTANEITY

6 - 31 January 2012

Starkwhite is pleased to present The gentle brutality of simultaneity by Bulgarian-born, Berlin-based artist Mariana Vassileva from 6 - 31 January 2012. The exhibition is presented in collaboration with DNA, Berlin.

All of us are bearers of time - times experienced and recounted, read and desired. Existing and occurring in the here and now is what legitimizes the present, which - on the surface - can appear as an open or closed entity. In reality, however, every one of us in the present is a collage formed of various elements of experience. Our continuous, linear-temporal actions result in both successive and parallel aspects in the synchronism of assembled fragments and forms consisting of memories and political, social, and cultural perspectives. Thought constructs of different mass and content - similar to plastic shapes - rub up against one another at different speeds.

In the concurrence of asynchrony, we lose ourselves only to find and redefine ourselves anew.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices. Starkwhite also represents artists from New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific rim.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images.

Ann Shelton In a Forest

In a forest addresses the shifting symbolic status of a particularly charged group of trees. Presented to the one hundred and thirty gold medalists at the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin, the seedlings were conceived as a gift from the German people and presented by members of the Olympic Committee and reportedly, in one instance, by Hitler himself.

Of the one hundred and thirty gifted seedlings, many are no longer locatable, however one, now an adult oak tree, grows in the artist's hometown of Timaru, New Zealand, in the grounds of Timaru Boys' High School. First photographed in early 2005, this tree has become the centrepiece of Shelton's enquiry, which forms a kind of map or incomplete archive and charts a link between the oaks and National Socialism's brutal history.

Sometimes referred to colloquially as 'Hitler Oaks' these globally dispersed trees share a mythic status. in a forest considers this mythic status as well as a series of complex concerns: critiques of sporting, nationalistic and Olympic narratives; the ideological appropriation of these trees as symbols of Germanic strength and monuments to sporting prowess; memorialisation and the politics of post-World War II history; and the wider cultural complexities of remembering and forgetting.

The artist says: "The title in a forest addresses this complexity and the abstract nature of signs in general. The images initially engage with the surface information that forms part of the public or collective memory. Further, they address the mutable ideological status of these living objects, as well as their locations and idiosyncratic historical contexts.Today many of the trees are charged as symbols of the political and sporting pride of nation states' and in this sense they represent a failed attempt through the appropriation of the oak tree as symbol, to assert a particular ideology via the seedlings sent out around the globe.

"This group of trees haunts the contemporary imagination. It is my intention to examine the conundrum they represent and the wider issues they confront. To remind me as much as anyone that links to tragic periods in world history can exist in one's own far-flung hometown: links that cannot be completely erased by language or re-appropriation."-

After completing a BFA at Auckland University's Elam School of Fine Arts, Shelton graduated with an MFA from The University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Most recently she edited the publication Sightseeing, an exhibition and a publication of postcards that explore the representation of place in contemporary German and New Zealand photography. This group show includes Shelton's work amongst 8 German and 8 New Zealand featured artists.

In 2009 she exhibited the series Public Places in Images Recalled (Bilder auf Abruf), Germany's photographic biennale curated by Tobias Berger and Esther Ruelfs. In 2006 her project a library to scale was awarded the Trust Waikato Contemporary Art Award and in 2007 the project toured New Zealand and Australia. In 2004 Shelton was the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery's artist in residence, during which time she produced the solo exhibition a kind of sleep and completed once more from the street originally exhibited at Starkwhite.Other recent exhibitions include: Unpacking My Library, Curated by Stephen Cleland, at the Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Auckland; Collect/Project, curated by Tina Barton, Adam Art Gallery, Wellington; and Earth Matters, curated by Natasha Conland, Auckland Art Gallery Toi oi Tamaki

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices. Starkwhite also represents artists from New Zealand, Asia and the Pacific-rim.

Hye Rim Lee Crystal City Spun

20 June to 1 July 2011

Starkwhite is pleased to present Hye Rim Lee's animation Crystal City Spun from 20 June to 1 July 2011, in association with Kukje Gallery, Seoul.

Crystal City Spun is a spectacle of sexually charged stimuli, which opens with a cityscape of spinning dildo towers. Out of the landscape emerges Dragon YONG, a vehicle for fantasy exploration by TOKI, a highly stylized, curvaceous, warrior-cum-vixen who draws upon the Japanese tradition of Manga, Korean animamix and Western ideals of sexuality and beauty.

The video has a playful, childlike quality alluding to fantasy and toys such as pink bunny rabbits and digitally exaggerated reflections. But at the same time, Lee explores sexual innuendo and plays with varying degrees of sexuality and sexual expression both with imagery and color. The video utilizes the latest techniques in 3D digital technology creating some characters in "crystal" structure, lending the work a delicacy and elegance.

Although the artist's work is rooted in the challenges facing the Asian community who have settled in New Zealand, the work also speaks to the manipulation and perception of female sexual identity worldwide. Furthermore, Lee challenges the conventions of the traditionally male-dominated worlds of game structure and 3D animation, specifically when it comes to virtualized images of women. Crystal City is a project in which cyberculture and contemporary myth-making intersect.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo exhibitions, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices. Starkwhite represents artists from New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific Rim.

Jin Jiangbo Dialogue with Nature

20 June to 17 September 2011

Starkwhite is pleased to present Jin Jiangbo: Dialogue with Nature from 20 June to 17 September 2011.

Previous to the new body of work featured in Dialogue with Nature, Jin Jiangbo became known to international contemporary art audiences through a practice that sought to not only chart China's growing global influence but also explore the impact of change upon both the urban landscape and its people.

At a time of immense economic, social and cultural shift, Jin Jiangbo's photography, installation and multimedia works capture this momentous transition while also highlighting the incongruities hidden behind the rise of a burgeoning superpower. Panoramic photos of abandoned factories, unfinished residences or the debris left by rapid and often overnight factory closures bear witness to China's economic miracle, but also the withdrawal and decay that too-hasty development can inflict. In his photographs the urban landscape becomes a social imprint of the powerful and spectacular transformation wrought by and upon contemporary China. It is not just scenery but social landscape the artist is delivering - vivid, telling and richly symbolic.

New Zealand audiences were introduced to Jin Jiangbo's work at New Plymouth's Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in 2009 in China in Four Seasons,a year-long suite of exhibitions and residencies by Chinese artists curated by Rhana Devenport.His exhibition featured large-scale photographic panoramas from series titled Prospects of theChinese Market, The Great Economic Retreat: The Dongguan Scene, and Shanghai, Shanghai Engine Plan, all setting China's socialist economic landscape against a backdrop of economic, social and cultural upheaval.

In 2010 Jin Jiangbo returned New Zealand as a visiting scholar at Auckland University's Elam School of Fine Arts. During his three-month stay he journeyed to the deep south and the far north capturing images along the way for a new project, which he describes as "a form of dialogue with nature". In his new series of photographs Jin Jiangbo looks again to landscape but of a very different kind. Again we see an allegorical approach to image making in this new series and also the artist's astute temporality, but the location has shifted from urban China to the seemingly untouched and remote landscapes of New Zealand. Offering a series of views of mountains, lakes, ominous skies and windswept beaches, sometimes accompanied by panels naming the places and executed in the artist's hand in the manner of traditional calligraphy, the artist draws upon iconic New Zealand scenery and offers it back to the viewer with a plot twist, that of shanshui, an ancient style of Chinese painting that first rose to prominence in the Liu Song Dynasty.

Frequently we see an artist take something unfamiliar and make it recognisable, acting as a broker into the mainstream of unfamiliar ideas, concepts and approaches. Yet what we see in this new series of images is the inverse - the artist taking something well known and making it unfamiliar, even slightly alien.

In these images our well known places look strange, unlike what we know. Jin Jiangbo offers us a reworking of our own landscape through his own heritage and China's shanshui tradition, giving it a cultural inflection that allows New Zealanders to look through new cultural eyes - to look afresh at what we thought we knew. Presenting the work in the style of a one and a half millennia old tradition, Jin Jiangbo has made the familiar unfamiliar.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo exhibitions, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices. Starkwhite represents artists from New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific Rim.

Jim Speers New Windsor Rd

20 August to 10 September 2011

Starkwhite is pleased to present New Windsor Rd by Jim Speers from 20 August to 10 September 2011.

New Winsor Rdwas filmed last summer in the western suburbs of Auckland while Speers was the artist in residence at the McCahon House in Titirangi.

In a series of long takes, the film explores the midday solitude of a slice of outlying suburbia - empty streets, sections awaiting buildings, where the other side of the road meets open fields - taking us from here to there while everyone else is elsewhere. With its focus on the everyday, New Windsor Rd is a meditation on what happens when nothing happens.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices. Starkwhite also represents artists from New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific rim.

ALICIA FRANKOVICH, LARESA KOSLOFF, RUTH PROCTOR

7 March to 2 April 2011

Starkwhite is pleased to present a group show by Alicia Frankovich (DE), Laresa Kosloff (AUS) and Ruth Proctor (UK) from 7 March to 2 April as part of the Auckland Arts Festival 2011.

This exhibition brings together three contemporary practitioners focused on movement: its potential, and its lack. Using objects, film and the printed image Frankovich, Kosloff and Proctor explore the relationship between the performative body and artworks. These artists' multi-disciplinary works reference historical art movements such as DADA along with other disciplines, including dance and gymnastics to create a dialogue between art and the body.

You can find out more about the Festival's visual arts programme and related events at http://www.aucklandfestival.co.nz/visual-arts.aspx. A poster printed on Tasman newsprint, 48 gsm, featuring a conversation among the artists is also available from the gallery for the occasion of the exhibition.

Born in New Zealand, performance and installation artist Alicia Frankovich lives in Berlin. She is the recipient of the Creative New Zealand Berlin Visual Artists Residency 2010/2011.

Laresa Kosloff lives and works in Melbourne. Her practice incorporates a wide range of mediums, from film and animation to drawing and performance.

London-based Ruth Proctor describes her practice as staging performative moments with sculpture, film and drawing. She has shown extensively in the UK and Europe, but will be exhibiting in New Zealand for the first time.

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices.

Clinton Watkins Selection

27 September to 22 October 2011

Starkwhite is pleased to present Selection by Clinton Watkins from 27 September to 22 October 2011.

Since 1994 Clinton Watkins has produced artwork that investigates affects that combinations of sonic and visual information can have on an audience. The key conceptual issues of his work are drawn from an interest in constructing immersive experiences through the use of sound, colour and scale of installation incorporating video projection, television monitors and custom-made audio and video hardware. The visual and sound base of his work focuses on the characteristics, structures, phenomena, and processing of sonic and visual material through the exploration of repetition, distortion, colour, duration and form via a minimalist sensibility.

Watkins is also a practicing musician who regularly produces and performs as a solo artist and collaboratively as an active member of the minimal electronic improvisation sextet, Plains and one half of the electronic noise duo 1000. Watkins has numerous releases of recorded material on a variety of local and international record labels such as Circle, 20 City, Claudia, Mystery Sea, CMR, Absurd and Scarcelight. Watkins holds a Doctoral Degree in Fine Arts and lecturers at Elam School of Fine Arts in time-based media. Selection is an exhibition of video and sound work created between 2007-2011.Recent solo exhibitions include Test Tone Aotea Center, NZ (2011); Force Fields, Two Rooms, NZ (2010); Line & Tone Hirschfeld, Berlin (2009); Avalanche NZ Film Archive (2009); and Cont Ship #1-#3/New New Wave #1-#2 Square 2, Wellington City Art Gallery (2008). His work has also been featured in curated group exhibitions throughout New Zealand, Australia and Europe including Wall of Sound, Te Tuhi (2010); Under, Lopdell House (2010); Super Deluxe Artspace, Sydney (2010); Black Out, I.C.A.N. Sydney (2010); 7:5, Two Rooms, NZ (2009); Past-Present-Place, Heidelberger Kunstverein, DE (2008); Martini Shot, (Artspace 2007); 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Auckland City Art Gallery (2006). Watkins also features Frieze magazine London issue 126 (2009) http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/clinton_watkins/ and Art News NZ Autumn issue (2011).

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices. Starkwhite also represents artists from New Zealand, Asia and the Pacific-rim.

Trenton Garratt WHAT’S THE SUN

12 July to 6 August 2011

Starkwhite is pleased to present What's the Sun by Trenton Garratt from 12 July to 6 August 2011.

Garratt says: "For this exhibition I have selected works from different projects within my practice that address the visual agency with which I produce and consume art.

Featured in the exhibition are works that consider pictorial compositions as constellations of light and draw on curiosity and desire through conceptual and formal qualities such as signs, values, surface and materiality."

Recent projects by the artist include: Model Conversations, a performance and design project in the exhibition Knowing You, Knowing Me curated by Emma Bugden for Artspace, Auckland (2010); -.- (dash-dot-dash) commissioned by the Auckland City Council (2010); and Out/In exhibited at Daire Sanat, Instanbul and Grimmuseum, Berlin (2010).

Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices. Starkwhite also represents artists from New Zealand, Asia and the Pacific-rim.